Mr. Burdell runs a medium sized intramural sports program for his college. We previously showed how IMTrack can help Mr. Burdell manage his league. Now Mr. Burdell wants to schedule his employees for the games. He wants to schedule two umpires for each game, along with a field supervisor and a score keeper. He wants to ensure that there is a veteran official calling the balls and strikes each game, except for the recreational league which he can train the newer officials on handling the plate. For the competitive league, he would prefer to have two veterans on the field.
RefTrack will meet the requirements of Mr. Burdell perfectly. Since Mr. Burdell already uses IMTrack, the leagues and games already entered in the database will be available for scheduling immediately. If Mr. Burdell didn’t use IMTrack, he would have to create a sport, the three leagues, and then enter the schedule for each league before proceeding. While it is simple to create the schedules in RefTrack, the integration with IMTrack does provide Mr. Burdell a nice head start to the job at hand.
Mr. Burdell will have to create a series of User Groups to handle the assignments. Due to the different tasks involved, there are three major User Groups needed: Supervisors, Score Keepers and Softball Officials. Mr. Burdell can use score keepers and supervisors across different sports. But to prevent officials from other sports getting emails about Softball, he decided to create a specific group for Softball. To meet his requirement for assignment of rookies and veterans, he will create two additional User Groups, Softball Officials - Veterans and Softball Officials – Rookies. Due to the sensitivity of the status, Mr. Burdell can mark these two User Groups as Internal. The officials will only know that they are assigned as Softball Officials, but not whether they are rookies or veterans.
For each employee, Mr. Burdell will be able to assign them to the user groups they belong to. For example, a veteran official (Joe Ump) that also Supervisors would be assigned to the Supervisors, Softball Officials, and Softball Officials – Veterans groups. A rookie official that would also like to score keep can be assigned to Score Keepers, Softball Officials, and Softball Officials – Rookies. There is nothing that would prevent an official from being both in the Veteran and Rookie groups. In fact it could be that all veterans are also assigned to the rookies group unless they did not want to work on the recreational league. Each official will then have access to an online directory of employees that matches the user groups they are assigned to. For example, Joe Ump would be able to get separate lists for all Supervisors and Softball Officials. He would not have access to the Score Keepers directory because he was not placed in that user group. Likewise, he won’t be able to know which officials are veterans and which officials are rookies because those user groups were marked as internal.
With the user groups created and each employee profiled, now Mr. Burdell needs to create the employee titles for each game. For softball four employee titles are needed, Supervisor, Home Plate, Field Ump, and Score Keeper. Each sport can have as many titles as needed. When creating employee titles, Mr. Burdell can specify which user group would be used to populate each position. This is very straight forward in some cases as the Supervisor group is used for the Supervisor title and likewise the Score Keeper group is used for the Score Keeper title. For the Home Plate and Field Ump titles though, Mr. Burdell will have to customize which group is used to fill the assignments on a league by league basis, per his requirements. For the Competitive league, both slots will be filled from the Softball Officials – Veteran group. On the Women’s league, the home plate ump will be using the Veterans, while the Field Ump slot will use the rookies. The Recreational league will fill both slots with the Rookies group.
To finish the assignment process, Mr. Burdell can ask his employees to go to the web portal and block any conflicts that could affect their availability to work on a given day/time. These conflicts could either be related to playing for teams, conflicts with school work, or even conflicts with teams they are affiliated with such as teams from the same fraternity or residence hall. Once assignments are made, the employees can accept or decline their assignments from the web portal, and view their work schedule for the entire season.