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> Resources > The Human Services Professionals > RC.xls Resource Home Page > open letter  

open letter

Recent Changes

Dear Organisation

Re: an invitation to get on board with RosterCoster.xls

This is an open letter to let you know about a formal program we have put in place, if you are interested, in order to:
  1. By virtue of you getting on board, further enhancing the tool as a best practice standard into the 2010s, it having been distributed widely in the 2000s; and
  2. Allow you to cost your rosters and perform other key rostering tasks against a recognised best practice standard (costings are considered 'best practice' if they have a version number in the top left hand corner that also appears at http://VersionControl.RosterCoster.com).
Key issues in relation to the tool in the past have included:
  1. It has never had a genuine 'user support system', including online help, and a person you can talk to, or have come out, if you need it. (I have never been any good for this, being so tied up with DHS internal services over the past 10 years).
  2. We have always left it to an organisation to contact us if it needs us. While this is a good strategy in many ways, it does have the effect of Awards coded into the tools falling out of date. And this compromises the tool as something a manager wants to 'go to'.
  3. The tool has always been a quite basic model, simply costing the roster in front of you, and not giving you a figure for management overheads, and not giving you electronic timesheets, and so on.
  4. It has been supported by just a single person, myself, which is not enough, given that we are also supporting the tool for every internal DHS shared supported accommodation setting.
To address issues like these, and to also take the tool to the next level as a clearly recognised standard across the sector, we have brought together a team to support the tool, backed by an online support system. All members of the team have been, like myself, line managers in internal DHS accommodation services.
 
Further, we have built the tool up to a more sophisticated platform. The new platform can for example:
  1. Allow a person looking at a costing and know that it is linked to an attached roster and house profile (via a reference number on all three documents), know that it is costed on an up-to-date tool (via an online reference that anyone with internet can check).
  2. Allow the tool to 'repair itself' if it should pick up an excel-related glitch (this has always been a draw-back with using excel, though we note that excel is almost unbeatable for copy/paste and other features).
  3. Block the user from costing a roster that has shifts that break Award and local business rules. 
  4. Allow you to produce a set of timesheets at the end of the fortnight, which can be cross-checked against paper timesheets after payroll is run (with the logic being that once you've had this in place for a few months, the need to reduce errors will force paper timesheets to become more accurate, and aligned to the roster at the start of the fortnight.
  5. Online user support accessed via a link on the tool, including user manuals, FAQs, scheduled upgrades and so on.
  6. A dedicated contact person for your organisation.
  7. Other...
All the while, we are keeping costs low, in terms of the benefits we think we can demonstrate will accrue if you get on board with this new platform.
 
Thank you for you time. One of our team will contact you in the near future, to see what you think of this new approach, whether you come on board with us or not.
 
Kind regards
 

Damien Ryan-Green
Damien.Ryan@RosterCoster.com
Phone 0438 388 922

In collaboration with Tony Ryan, Kylie Hughes, Christine Tiernan and Paul Morganti.
 

Last modified at 20/03/2009 15:36  by Damien Ryan