Reading a roster without rewriting it
The useful staffing file is the messy one your supervisors already use, not a new template they will abandon in a week.
When a staffing study is commissioned, someone usually offers to “clean” the roster into a new workbook with standardised shift codes. That workbook will be prettier. It will also be a week out of date the moment the Saturday supervisor writes on the paper copy taped to the fridge.
We ask for the file the floor already uses, column names and all. Then we write a glossary: what “AM” means in packing versus in the shop, whether a blank cell is a day off or a missing mark, how overtime is written when it is time-in-lieu. The glossary is dull. It prevents us from inventing a second reality.
If two sites share a brand but not a roster language, we treat them as two studies. Merging them in a hurry is how a night vacancy disappears into a daytime average.
Bring the messy file. Bring last month’s paper if that is what people actually trust. We would rather reconcile ink than admire a template nobody opens.