how to do a shift planning with smartsheet?

Joachim Mund

Hello,

who has experience in the implementation of a shift planning and possibly a template or tips for me?

The requirements:

 - there are early and late shifts

 - in each shift customer service, phone service, flexible service (so 6 shifts per day)

 - Employees can schedule their shifts themselves, on a daily basis or over a period of time

 - Team leaders can also schedule employees

 - Team leaders need to make sure that all shifts are staffed

I tried a solution via card view with view by day, but I did not find a solution for assigning employees to the 6 shifts per day:

1. customer service early, 2. phone service early, 3. flexible early, 4. customer service late, 5. phone service late, 6. flexible late.

The order of the cards is not known in the spreadsheet.

Thank you very much for your hints and best practice, Joachim

Julio S.

Hi @Joachim Mund ,

Although I didn't found any specific template that may meet your requirements, I was able to build an example project that takes advantage of some Smartsheet advanced functionality such as the Gantt view, project settings, hierarchy and conditional formatting.

In my example below, I've added each shift type in a dropdown single select column so that each value can be easily selected; I then created some test contacts in a Contact list type of Column (Employee 1-6 and Manager 1-6) that you may adjust to your own needs. By using hierarchy, you can easily sub-divide each day in all correspondent shifts and while activating dependencies, the parent row will show roll-up data from all children rows. I recommend playing around with these functionalities to best adjust your needs.

 Sample of Project

 Conditional formatting adjustments for task bars in Gantt view

Project settings to add labels to task bars with specific column information:

On a separate note, if you'd be interested in tracking time and expenses about each project or resource, Resource Management could prove to be quite helpful and you may want to discuss this with your Sales representative as this is a premium add-on.

I hope that this can offer you an overview of which functionalities might be helpful for your needs but if you are running into a particular road-block or would need further advise on your solution, please make sure to add some screenshots of your solution where any confidential information has been hidden.

Cheers!

Julio

Joachim Mund

Thank you very much @Julio S. for this great examples.

I started working nearly in the same direction and get some very useful insights from your example.

I also found no way to use the cardview for shift planning because the order of cards at a day could not be processed in the table view which means mapping position 1 => shift 1, etc.