Advanced Confirmation Options
Confirmation options for risky and unusual shift combinations
Most assignment confirmations are straightforward extensions of the schedule, or routine replacements of an upcoming assignment via a swap or similar action.
However certain combination of shifts in an assignment give rise to riskier situations where On-Call Optimizer will seek additional guidance and input from the schedule admin when the confirmation could result in unexpected changes to the schedule.
Reassignment of completed shifts
Changing the assignee of a completed (historic) shift creates an imbalance in the schedule resulting in extra work for On-Call Optimizer in future assignments. Often this extra work requires the selection of less-optimal schedules in the short-term (e.g. more shifts, closer together for members significantly under their target) to attempt to bring the schedule back into balance.
While the other rules continue to act as moderating factors preventing On-Call Optimizer from completely overwhelming under-assigned users in a single assignment, the larger the reassignment of completed shifts is, the harder it becomes for a truly optimal future assignment to be found.
To ensure schedule admins have fully understood these implications, On-Call Optimizer requires the Aceept reassignment of completed shifts? toggle to be explicitly turned on during the confirmation of any assignment containing shifts that have already completed (e.g. end in the past).
If the assignment is confirmed with the toggle off (the default state) any historic (previously completed) shifts in the assignment are ignored and the history remains unchanged.
Truncation of the schedule horizon
If the assignment being confirmed ends prior to the previously assigned horizon of the schedule (the end of the last assigned shift), there are two potential behaviours that could be intended:
- Replace just those shifts in the assignment being confirmed, leaving any later shifts in the schedule untouched.
- Replace all future shifts in the schedule with those from the assignment being confirmed, removing any later shifts not in the assignment.
On-Call Optimizer defaults to the first behaviour (no truncation), but allows the confirmer of the assignment to explicitly opt-in to truncating the horizon by toggling the Truncate schedule horizon? option on.
When an assignment is confirmed with the toggle enabled, all existing shifts in the schedule ending after the end of the last shift in assignment are removed. The standard schedule lifecycle will then resume to re-assign out to the configured horizon as required.
Other Warnings
The following situations will display an informational message in the dialog, but do not require any other actions besides clicking the Confirm button at the bottom of the dialog once the warning has been accepted.
Alternative assignment
Shown when an assignment whose shifts originate from an alternative that has been selected for use instead of the best assignment is being confirmed to prevent unintentional use of non-optimal shifts.
Empty confirmation
Attempting to confirm an assignment containing only completed shifts without accepting reassignment will result in a saved assignment containing no shifts and no changes to the schedule.
New configuration version
Confirming an assignment generated from a customized schedule configuration requires first promoting the configuration into the schedule’s history to assign it a version number.