Rota management software: the leap of faith

Adopting new software can be a worry. Especially adopting software that directly impacts something as important as managing your workforce.

We get that.

That’s why we go the extra mile to ensure your transition on to Rotaready goes as smoothly as possible. In this blog I’ll explain some of what we do behind the scenes to help with the “leap of faith”.

When you choose Rotaready, we’re very much hands-on, guiding you through the three key steps…

Setting up your rota management software

Put simply, we always take the time to fully understand your requirements so we can configure our rota management software to work perfectly for you.

All the way from setting up your staff groups, inputting all your staff, their details, holiday allowance and individual working parameters (e.g. skills, contracted hours, availability), capturing your staffing level requirements, building bespoke fairness scenarios, constructing your cost stream mappings, tinkering with permission levels and so on; it’s of utmost importance to us that you see instant success.

One of Rotaready’s unique features is that rotas are generated automatically at the click of a button. And clearly, this is the part that can be the hardest to trust when you first get going. Since we brought Rotaready to market, one thing we’ve noticed is that every client believes their scheduling requirements and practices are too complicated to conform to rota management software! In fact, before we give you the green light to get cracking, there’s a huge amount of testing and comparisons with your own rotas that we perform to confirm the automatically generated rotas meet (and ideally exceed) your needs and expectations.

Training is clearly a very important factor with any new software. We’ve built Rotaready to be intuitive and fun to use. You won’t need to send your managers on all-day training programmes because we spend some quality time to give them the skills and confidence they need to make the most out of Rotaready from day 1.

The green light

Depending on the size of your business, Rotaready will affect, replace or interface with a number of your processes & functions. From larger organisations with HR, payroll and business intelligence software to smaller setups where processes are all spreadsheet-driven, there will always be a number of areas that are subject to change. For this reason, we usually implement Rotaready as a gentle transition rather than a “big bang”.

So the next step is often a “parallel run”, whereby you continue to run a few of your existing processes (timesheets are a common example) in parallel with using our rota management software, to give you extra comfort and minimise the disruption. This gives you the chance to compare your own results against those from Rotaready.

If you’ve already published a few weeks’ rosters, we can input them into Rotaready to give you a chance to explore.

Ongoing support

We’ll be in close contact over your first few weeks to help with any queries you may have. It won’t take long for you to get fully up to speed!

One benefit of Rotaready being cloud-based means we can monitor your environment remotely. So chances are, we’ll know before you if you need support with managing time & attendance records, handling absence requests, managing rotas and the like.

It’s our highest priority that you hit the ground running. What experiences (good or bad) have you had with implementing new software? Leave us a comment below.