Week 9 Shift: The rota

You design the roster that will carry the sandbox through to handover, and argue about what the work is worth

3 May 2027

Two weeks into running a queue, the team argues about the rota. This is on schedule.

Before the Shift#

Pull the week 8 numbers: decisions per person, time of day, appeal rate, and who did the most.

In the Shift#

Look at the distribution first. In every cohort that has run this course, one person has done between three and five times the median. Find them. They are usually pleased about it, and week 9’s lecture explains why that is the problem rather than the solution.

Design the rota against the failure modes rather than against the volume: caps, rotation off the worst queue, a second signature above a severity threshold, a named person who covers a no-show, and a review date.

Then the costing. Take your sandbox’s hours, apply a real hourly rate, and put a number on a semester of it. Scale the number to a community of two million. Argue about who should be paying it and what would change if they did — this is the one argument in the course with no answer on the answer sheet.

Afterwards#

The rota commences. It has a review date. Somebody will have to chair that.