Running a planning cycle

Follow a Planning Cycle through Notify, Availability & Leave, Generate, and Roster Review to a published Duty Plan — and see what to do if generation fails.

Once an Auto Duty is set up, it plans one Planning Cycle per period. Open the Auto Duty’s detail page to see its next scheduled cycle, or select an in-progress one to follow its stages.

Starting a cycle

Cycles normally start on their own, on the cadence you set. If you need one sooner, open the Auto Duty and select Start Manual Cycle, then pick the period from the list. A period that leaves less than the configured planning window is flagged, and a period that already has a cycle in progress is disabled.

The 5 stages

1. Notify

   Select Notify Team & Open Collection. This sends every doctor in the pool a heads-up and opens the availability window — there’s nothing to review yet.

2. Availability & Leave

   Staff update their availability at any time, and admins can approve or reject leave in parallel — these aren’t sequential steps. The panel shows two live counts:

   • Staff availability — how many doctors have responded, and how many are still pending.
   • Leave requests — how many are waiting on admin approval, with a shortcut to Review Requests.

   If anyone hasn’t responded, select Send Reminder to nudge them. This is a one-off, admin-triggered send, not an automatic recurring reminder.

   When you’re ready, select Generate Duty Plan — you don’t need every response in first.

3. Generate

   The engine solves the roster against the current doctor pool, the Auto Duty’s Shift Schedule, and its rules. This runs in the background and usually finishes within a minute.

4. Roster Review

   Check the generated Duty Plan — team size, coverage, and any soft violations — then select Publish Roster when you’re happy with it.

5. Published

   The Duty Plan is live and visible to the team, the same as any published roster. See Publishing a roster for what staff see next.

If Generate duty plan automatically is on for this Auto Duty, the cycle jumps from Availability & Leave straight to Generate on its own once the review window closes — you don’t need to click Generate Duty Plan yourself. If Publish automatically is also on, Roster Review is skipped too and the cycle goes straight to Published.

If generation fails

A cycle that can’t produce a valid schedule lands in Failed, with the reason shown alongside:

• A structural configuration problem — for example, a duplicate shift name or unresolved staffing role — is flagged with a warning that retrying won’t help until the Auto Duty’s Shift Schedule or rules are fixed.
• A roster capacity summary shows the doctor count, role breakdown, and how many slots the period needs, so you can see at a glance whether the pool is simply too small.
• Suggested next steps lists what to try.

Select Retry Generation once you’ve made a fix — the cycle re-solves against the same period without you having to start a new one.

Cancelling a cycle

At any point before Published, select Cancel Planning Cycle to stop it. A cancelled cycle doesn’t send further notifications and won’t generate or publish — start a new manual cycle for the same period if you need to.

Next steps

How Auto Duty Planning works

A refresher on Auto Duty, Planning Cycle, and Duty Plan.

Roster and shift statuses

Where planning cycle stages fit alongside roster statuses.