Moving six clinics onto one rota

When I took over operations, each of our six clinics planned its staff in its own spreadsheet. Two kept a paper board as well. Nobody could answer a simple question on a Monday morning: who is short this week, and who could cover?

Start with the people who fill it in

I spent my first month with the six rota managers before looking at any software. They were not resisting change. Each had built something that worked for their clinic, and they knew exactly where a group template would fail them: night cover at Vincennes, the part-time radiographers shared between two sites.

We wrote those cases down and used them to test every supplier. Three of the five dropped out at that stage.

Run both for a quarter

We moved one clinic at a time and kept the old spreadsheets alive for three months. It cost more in the short term and it annoyed the finance team. It also meant nobody lost a shift when the new system got something wrong, which it did twice in the first month.

What changed

Agency spending fell by 18% in the first full year, mostly because a gap at one clinic could now be offered to staff at the next one before it went to an agency. Overtime barely moved, which I had not expected and still want to understand. The rota managers kept their jobs and got their Friday afternoons back.