What is it?

CunningPlan is a tool to schedule people across recurring events, e.g: volunteer band rosters, dynamic teams serving every week or maintenance rosters for buildings.

In these scenarios you have a number of people, able to do perform one or more roles, with dynamic and varying availability, and you need a way to come up with a roster / schedule / plan for those people for, say, three months.

Lets avoid pain

If you've ever tried to create a roster in sheets/excel for 30 odd people, you know how much fun it isn't.

CunningPlan, in a nutshell, will let you put those people into various roles, defines rules, vacation times and so forth and come up with a fair plan out the other end. In short it takes all the pain away from creating rosters in google sheets / excel.

Awesome sauce

Aside from the help you get creating your first plan, the super-awesome-sauce is when you go to create your next plan.

For the next plan all you have to do is duplicate the previous, set any unavailability, and you're done. You can let people themselves add their own unavailablity if you like, and the plan is updated automatically. Once you're happy with it, Publish it and lock it from editing.

What should I read first?

The manual is split into three main parts.

  1. Installation
  2. General concepts
  3. Examples

While other sections exist; the above three are the main ones that'll be useful in getting you up to speed and understanding how the app works.

It's recommended that you read the Concepts guide, as this will set you up to understand how we've approached solving the problem of creating a roster. It'll also familiarise you with terms that'll be used throughout the rest of this manual.

Getting further help

At present the app is in beta, and made freely available to anyone that wants to use it.

We've tried to put as much useful information into the docs such that you should only need to engage paid support if you're really stuck or want to implement a custom scenario.

For one-on-one support pricing via our professional services, please get in touch with shinywhitebox and we can discuss your requirements and how to best help you solve them.