Why Is Scheduling So Difficult?
Scheduling sports leagues and recreation facilities is a time consuming, complex and important task. They are two of the most important tasks associated with most city/town Parks & Recreation Departments, Sports Organizations, and Recreation Businesses. Creating round robin schedules for teams and booking or assigning time slots to users or customers at recreation facilities are two entirely different functions that require a lot of time and attention to detail.
When people, teams, customers, etc., are double booked, not booked, booked into the wrong date, time, or location, or handed an unfair, unbalanced league schedule they have every right to complain. For recreation businesses it can mean loss of revenue. For parks & recreation departments and volunteer youth & adult sports leagues it usually means people drop out or don’t sign up to participate in your program the following season. Basically, poor scheduling leads to loss of control, angry people, and in some cases can be very costly.
A significant contributing factor associated with the scheduling problem is the software marketplace. There are far too many computer-scheduling programs on the market that are poorly designed (from a task analysis point of view). When advertisements for a “scheduling program” focuses on extraneous features, like; printing mailing labels, team registration forms, inventory control, accounting functions, fancy reports, etc., be careful. These non-scheduling features divert attention away from analyzing a programs “scheduling” ability/quality.
None of these added features help create better schedules, and usually causes a program to be not only more expensive, but difficult to learn and use as well.
No matter how you schedule, the printed results of your efforts are out there for the whole world to see. Remember, when scheduling is done correctly it rarely gets noticed. When scheduling is done incorrectly.., everybody notices.
If you want to create better schedules for your league or organization, please take a few moments and review the information on our web site about our scheduling software programs. You might be pleasantly surprised at not only what the programs do, but also the price.