The challenges of too much flexibility…and not enough billions.

We often reflect on how much of rostering some of the on-call rosters is a function of culture and history as much as the technical issues of creating optimised rosters. For our powerful self-rostering functions, each customer and potential customer has requests and suggestions on their roster building. Some questions we can say ‘yes’ to (‘Can you make school holiday weekdays worth more than regular weekdays?’) and some are ‘not yet’ (‘Can you make it that Dr Smith and Dr Jones are not on adjacent shifts, so that one of the couple can always be available for to look after their kids'?).

In this latter case, the more nuanced answer these days is ‘Our software can actually do this, but we have not made that function available as it puts a burden on other users managing the necessarily more-complex rostering interface.’

At all times we are conscious of the lessons provided by projects like the US armed forces’ Joint Tactical Radio System. This article diagnoses the problems: the attempt to make the project better and better actually made things worse, especially when ‘better’ was equated to ‘more bells and whistles’.

So although we always like to make our system more powerful and more flexible, we do so with a constant eye on what will actually improve the experience of all users. We like to think we get this right more often than not.

At least we at HosPortal do not have a few billions of dollars to play with to make really big mistakes…yet.

A JTRS radio…microphone, speakers, antenna and visual controls are extra.