The Tools of the Oppressor

The first big tool-building achievement was probably the weekly scheduling guide. The spreadsheet started off as a single grid that would tally up staff hours in different areas as they were assigned, for comparison against the attendance-based payroll targets that drove weekly scheduling. By the time I was done, the entire week’s schedule could be mapped out in one place and it would tell you itself if you were hitting the target.

Second would be Burbank’s first grouped schedule. The staffs from the 14/8/6 were being pooled together into single group, to be scheduled centrally from the 14. So they needed a form on which they could assign shifts across 5 different work areas, across 3 different job sites, for ~140 staff, that could generate daily site-specific schedules for the three buildings. It had to look out for work permit violations and flag them. It had to be locked down so that managers wouldn’t destroy it out of carelessness, but accessible enough that it would still be fully functional, and it had to be solid enough that other managers could use it without my holding their hands. Excel was very new to me and VB was completely foreign so the macros are in some ways spectacularly rudimentary. But in the end it worked and one of the busiest theatre complexes in the world was being operated on a daily basis with a tool I’d built.

step 1- staff availabilities

step 2- assign shifts

step 3- distribute

step 4- reporting

file tool- data space

user tool- file data

And I left AMC in 2006, so bear in mind these tools are where my skills were at close to 20 years ago, and these were just the HR pieces. My time at Pacific moved them much further along :)