RotaDoc is a tool for creating and publishing work rotas. It was created with hospitals in mind because the of the complexity of the rotas in that environment. It is particularly useful where people are swapping in and out of roles, as occurs with junior hospital doctors.
These are some of the advantages of using RotaDoc:
It provides a convenient editing system which is better than using a tool such as a word processor or a spreadsheet. It provides drop down lists to choose from for rota entries. It provides operations such as copy, paste and swap, and simple tools for creating rotations. The rota editor provides multiple levels of undo and redo.
RotaDoc provides two views of your rota - by task (a shift in RotaDoc parlance) or by person (a worker in RotaDoc parlance).
The shift view enables you to easily see "Who is doing what?", whereas the worker view shows "What am I doing?".
If you have people swapping in an out of roles on a regular basis, then it is often easier to make the rota in terms of roles. This is a typical scenario with junior hospital doctors. You can enter the dates that people are performing certain roles in RotaDoc. RotaDoc will then substitute their names when displaying the rota.
It is often a headache to create the rota to work around absences, such as annual leave. RotaDoc lets you enter absences once and see them as you edit the rota. You can also easily see any conflicts in the rota view.
You can publish any fragment of your overall rota using RotaDoc. Everyone in the rota can go to a single place to see their rotas. They can see whether rotas are final or provisional. However rotas that are still in preparation are hidden from viewers, they are only visible to the administrator. The rotas are protected by a password chosen by you.
You can also get a PDF version of the rota and send it via email or print it out.
With the pressures of work, it is often at home that people are scheduling their time. RotaDoc enables them to see what their work commitments are and manage their time off when they are away from the workplace.
RotaDoc enables users to see their individual work commitments and download those into their Palm PDA or Microsoft Outlook Calendar.
The pressures of work may mean that you also need to make rota changes from home. RotaDoc lets you do this, you can set up the data from work or home.
Making a rota section final protects all the rota entries that it covers. RotaDoc stops you accidentally changing those entries even when you are editing another rota that overlaps in time and shifts with that rota.
This is particularly useful because certain sections of the rota may be finalized further into the future than others. It also enables you to create the next part of the rota overlapping with the current one to get continuity.
RotaDoc enables you to create sections that overlap and publish or edit them separately.
This can be useful for the following reasons:
This helps quick visual identification of roles. RotaDoc will maintain uniform colors across your whole rota. You can change the colors across the whole rota at any point.