Scheduling

The not-for-profit sector is driven by dedicated workers who will do whatever it takes to help people. However, being stoic and working around issues can ultimately lead to fewer client service hours. The more workarounds we accept, the less time we spend delivering services. Automating tasks benefits everyone: workers and clients alike.

For example, team leaders might spend one to two hours a day reworking time cards to ensure payroll is correct. If we have four team leaders spending a couple of hours a day on such tasks, that's equivalent to one less full-time carer or 1.5 fewer workers since team leaders are more expensive. These issues often multiply as they flow downstream to payroll.

I have already lamented the poor support of vendor software for scheduling in human services, so I will not labor the point again here. Let's accept that the systems we use to capture the services delivered have some shortcomings, and ask if there is a simple solution to avoid the rework. In this case, the client management system is not applying the SCHADS award efficiently, given the actual hours traveled and client services delivered by each worker. Gaps in the system between travel time and client appointments can lead to incorrect payroll calculations, requiring decisions between offering a split shift or paying for additional travel time.

Sitting with a team leader demonstrating her workarounds, I was struck by the repetitiveness of the task. From a negative perspective, this was not an enjoyable exercise and must have been a burden on her workplace happiness. From a positive perspective, anything repetitive is easy to automate. Imagine the team leader's reaction if she never had to do this boring task again.

We could accept the shortcomings of the client management system and implement a small piece of code replicating the logic she had been applying every day. If the client management system had amazing APIs, these changes could be made directly in the system. Unfortunately, this particular system has poor APIs. However, even in this situation, it is almost trivial for a mid-tier developer to take the information from the client management system, rework it according to the same rules the team leader was using, and input it into the payroll system.

The question is, what is the maximum we would pay to get this done? As a rough guide, I would say one FTE, which is around $90,000 per year. So if I can get the job done for $40,000, everybody is happy. The real challenge, though, is cultural, not technical or even financial.

The status quo in many situations is to just get on with it. While I admire this Aussie battler culture (and have been a victim of it myself), it is a false economy. If we want to deliver more care and impact for any given funding dollar, we need to start thinking differently. We need to abhor waste because waste means delivering fewer services to our clients.

Efficiency can be a dirty word in the not-for-profit sector, but we need to get comfortable with it if we are to truly achieve our ambitions of delivering more impact per funding dollar. This is the very definition of "efficiency."

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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