Deployment and Rostering
Workforce Management and Rostering
In terms of commercial workforce planning tools, the area that is best served is that of workforce management and resource allocation. Typically these tools support the deployment of staff to tasks. The available staff are categorised in some way to represent their competence to undertake different activities. Requirements might typically be taken from a project plan, which sets out:
- the tasks to be completed,
- when they have to be completed
- what workforce input is required to complete them.
The software tool supports the planning of allocating staff to tasks to ensure the best utilisation of staffing resources. Some tools have an optimising routine to find the best allocation while others require this to be done manually.
Closely related to these tools are rostering tools where the issue is how best to deploy staff on a 24 hour/7 day roster in order to get the best match between workload and staffing input.
We will identify a number of tools in this section which typify what is available.