Advanced Confirmation Options

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:

1. Replace just those shifts in the assignment being confirmed, leaving any later shifts in the schedule untouched.
2. 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.

Shifts assigned without availability

Member availability information is not always available for the full duration of a requested assignment when:

1. A cross-schedule reference points to a schedule with a shorter horizon and/or assignment window than the schedule being assigned.
2. The requested shifts extend beyond the availability import bounds.

In these situations, On-Call Optimizer still assigns every requested shift, but keeps track of the limit of availability information provided by each source and defaults to not confirming any shifts after the earliest limit. The purpose of this default is to avoid confirming a shift assignment made without knowledge of a member’s availability.

During manual confirmation of an assignment (either a custom assignment or an automatic assignment requiring review), the schedule administrator has the opportunity to turn on the Accept shifts assigned without availability? toggle, which allows those shifts past the availability limit to be confirmed into the schedule.

Automatic assignments which do not require review are confirmed by On-Call Optimizer using the default behaviour — only those shifts ending prior to any availability information limit will be confirmed, and shifts in the remaining period after the limit will be retried in subsequent automatic assignment attempts until availability information covering them becomes available and they can be assigned.

Shifts are never truncated or partially confirmed when availability information limits are enforced. Only shifts fully within the limits of availability information are confirmed under the default behaviour.

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.