Jesse Dunlap
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Unscheduled Shifts
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Hit enter a bit too quick..
Is there a way to monitor and "police" unscheduled shifts that are deleted or changed?
Like with how you can restore a deleted shift occurrence with a time stamp but I'd like to be able to do that with a unscheduled or non-recurring shift.
Hi Jesse,
I don't believe that's possible at this time. The idea behind restoring a deleted occurrence of a recurring shift is to put back the shift as a whole while it's in the scheduler. Unscheduled or one-time shifts can simply be re-created and undoing a change to those hasn't brought up a useful use case as of yet.
Can you give me an idea under what circumstances this can be of use to you and how you use unscheduled or one-time shifts? (hence the reason why someone might end up changing one and you need to restore it)
We are honestly trying to use one-time shifts to keep up with team members taking personal time or PTO.
I'd like to give everyone "admin" rights essentially so we can all add in our days off as we get them approved. However I'd like to be able to keep visibility if someone else deletes another team members day off... Whether it's by accident or on purpose.
Hey Jesse,
So the "group" you are creating is for a calendar to keep track of PTO? Will this group ever be used for notifications or is this just for a visual display of who's out when?
If it's just for the visual display aspect, I'm not sure our calendaring system is the best place to do so for a lot of the headaches you're running into. I would suggest a google calendar or something for that kind of use.
However, if you still wanted to, I'm wondering if you set up a canvas in flow designer that would deal with the approval process and then programmatically add the "shifts" to a specific calendar. Then the "group" that owns said calendar can be locked down and only updated by the flow.
The process would be something like: User logs into xMatters and navigates to the Messaging tab. They find the "PTO Request Form" and enter the dates and maybe a note, then select the recipient (someone who should approve the request). The recipient receives the notification and selects "Approve" or "Reject". The response trigger in the canvas fires and adds a new shift in the group for the PTO timeframe.
Creating the shift would need to be a custom step, and might need two steps, one to retrieve the group and one to create the shift, but that might be an option if you're savvy with some javascript. You could also add a step to post the PTO shift to another calendaring system such as google calendar, although the authentication part might be tough.
I can see a couple improvements to the system we'll need to tighten this down, namely removing the recipient select from the user and instead doing a look up to the user's supervisor. Unfortunately right now there is not a way to insert code between hitting the submit in the messaging panel and the creation of the event. But this is coming some time in the future.
It might be a little more than what you're looking for but it might also solve some of the issues you're running into.
Happy Tuesday!
Well, this group wouldn't just be for PTO.
I wanted to automate on our Call rotation. We have 7 team members who just pass a phone from member to member every Tuesday on a weekly rotation.
I was hoping to keep all of our PTO and the on call rotation in the same place just for ease of use.
Thanks Jesse,
I do understand what you are trying to achieve - have you considered using the Temporary Absence feature instead?
https://help.xmatters.com/ondemand/user/temporary-replacements.htm
It could help avoid needing to do one-time shifts to fill gaps in the schedule when someone needs time away. To my knowledge having a restore from a deletion of a one-time shift is not possible at this time which is why finding a way around using those might be the better investment.
Travis' idea is also interesting, let me know where your leanings are knowing the options we've outlined.