About Job Allocation Strategy

The Job Allocation Strategy contains the staffing strategy to allocate people to blueprint jobs on the Planning Board and the Staffing page.

The List contained in the Job Allocation Strategy returns the initial set of candidates in a predefined order and the passes within the strategy are used to determine the jobs that best match the target candidate on the List; this is done by using the filter and sorting criteria in each pass.

Essentially, each pass is person centric in that it looks at the target person then runs a pass across the blueprint positions to find a matching job for that person. Typically, the first pass is an attempt to place people in their home assignment but this is one of many configuration examples because business rules vary and are highly configurable in this application.

For example, suppose Donna is the top candidate and Pass 1 initiates as part of the Job Allocation Strategy used to schedule the event jobs. Pass 1 returns no matching home jobs (positions) for Donna, so she is skipped but remains in front of the next candidate, Sarah. Sarah executes Pass 1, and the system finds a home job and schedules her. The system will move on to the next candidate, Brooke, and so on and so forth until the orderly list of unallocated people have exhausted Pass 1.

When Pass 1 completes, then it moves on to the remaining initial list of candidates, and this is where additional rules are used to either eliminate fully allocated people or partially allocated people using job allocation pass filters. In essence, when Pass 2 is ready to execute, depending on the business rules the system could return a list of candidates, which could be unallocated or partially allocated candidates - what happens next and how people and positions are sorted for each subsequent pass depends on each customer’s business rules.

The point here, is that each person on the candidate list triggers the Pass, and the Pass can be configured to further limit the List of candidates derived from the Strategy - and can process and sort positions in many different ways. A good start when configuring passes is to keep the rules and passes broad, test run, review the pass outcomes and tighten the configuration of rules and passes one at a time rather than overbuild, meaning over layer the rules, pass filters, number of passes - and then find yourself in a troubleshooting loop.

Important Configuration Note
This is very important - the job allocation is person-centric. Fill by Rules is position-centric. This means the job allocation tool is designed to do the opposite of Fill by Rules. Therefore any base rule, or argument within the base rule that targets the position or the day is not functional in the job allocation world because the tool looks at the person - there is no position context. As such, the application is looking at potentially many positions, days, ranks and so on to find a job for the person. To create the initial list of candidates use base rules that target the person’s assignment or profile data such as the rank, organizational level, shift, seniority data etc. For example, a good start would be a list that returns people at the station level. Then use the filters in the Pass to further limit the jobs by person such as same shift, same line, and so on. Review and refine the outcome for each pass. This will take some time. ~ Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast.

Important Configuration Note

This is very important - the job allocation is person-centric. Fill by Rules is position-centric. This means the job allocation tool is designed to do the opposite of Fill by Rules. Therefore any base rule, or argument within the base rule that targets the position or the day is not functional in the job allocation world because the tool looks at the person - there is no position context. As such, the application is looking at potentially many positions, days, ranks and so on to find a job for the person. To create the initial list of candidates use base rules that target the person’s assignment or profile data such as the rank, organizational level, shift, seniority data etc. For example, a good start would be a list that returns people at the station level. Then use the filters in the Pass to further limit the jobs by person such as same shift, same line, and so on. Review and refine the outcome for each pass. This will take some time. ~ Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast.