PERSON OF THE MONTH
Chris McCullough
Chris had an interesting first day as an A&E doctor: put in charge of the rota, he had to manage the complex shifts of all the staff. So began a fascination with the mathematical challenge and, eventually, a piece of software that could work for anyone.
There are a gazillion ways in which you could imagine stressful situations for a doctor, but managing the shift rota probably isn’t one of them. Yet that’s the problem Chris McCullough encountered on his very first day at work.
An A&E doctor for 16 years, McCullough eventually took the brave decision to quit medicine and devote himself full-time to Rotageek, scheduling software that saves managers from having to organise shifts, breaks and holidays by hand.
Spurned by the NHS, McCullough suddenly found businesses knocking at his door for the software, which is now used by companies as diverse as bookmakers and cupcake sellers. We found out how the doctor turned developer made it happen.
First day problems
McCullough is living validation of the maxim ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. “From day one, my first day as a doctor, I was put in charge of designing the rota,” he told PC Pro. “I treated it like a mathematical puzzle and, over the course of my career, I got more interested in how important schedules were, because they impacted on the lives of people who were working them, but also on the ability to deliver care for patients. If you got those [rotas] right, you really could do some great stuff for the staff and medical teams, but also the patients.”
In 2009, amendments to the European Working Time Directive posed an even greater conundrum for the NHS schedulers. For the first time, there were strict limits being imposed on the number of hours doctors could work, forcing the NHS to completely re-evaluate shift patterns. Money was put aside for pilots and McCullough, along with two colleagues, decided to make the NHS an offer. “We said ‘this is going to be a real big problem for you’. If you fund it, we’ll build it and you can have it, because we were really only interested in solving problems not creating a business. And they said no, so we decided to do it anyway.”
McCullough and his colleagues spent the next four years “learning how not to run a business”. They coded the cloud software themselves and then tried selling it to the NHS with cloud still in its infancy – “which wasn’t a terribly clever thing to do”.
However, by 2013 others were starting to take an interest. Rotageek was approached by a big hotel chain, a veterinary practice, a chain of gyms. “After six months of getting these calls, we thought maybe there’s a business in this”. There was one big problem, though: scheduling software designed for the unusual shift-patterns of doctors didn’t necessarily translate well to other types of enterprise. Plus, the advent of iPads and smartphones meant the browser-based system had moved on. “We had a discussion between the three of us and we thought we’re going to scrap the entire tech, take everything that we’ve learnt and re-build everything from the ground up,” explained McCullough. “We showed it to our first few clients before we’d finished it in 2014, and that’s where it really took off.”
Juggling schedules
Anyone who’s ever managed a team of even modest size will know that juggling rotas is a hassle. Parents all want holiday at the same time during the school holidays and staff often stockpile holiday; some staff can’t work certain days because of childcare; workers constantly want to swap shifts, often with people who don’t have the necessary skill set; and ensuring you don’t have gaps during lunch and tea breaks is surprisingly tricky. Rotageek takes into account these and all manner of other factors, such as the maximum numbers of hours each staff member is permitted to work, as well as skill sets and budgets. “We algorithmically create a near-optimum solution for that problem and then we send that back to the team member who’s creating the schedules to allow them to sense-check it from a human point of view and iterate it, if they need to,” said McCullough.
Retaining that human factor is important: staff are unlikely to respond well to ‘computer says no’ if they’re told they can’t have a fortnight off to take their kids to Disney World. “Our job is to empower people to make better decisions, so ultimately there’s always a person at the end of it,” said McCullough.
Having said that, the Rotageek system also offers transparency, perhaps helping to reduce suspicion of favouritism when it comes to allocating holidays and shift patterns. “That human bit can actually be fraught with bias,” he said. “When people request leave, it [Rotageek] shows you who else is off, or how many people are off. It shows blackout periods in companies, such as over Christmas or Black Friday for retailers. It makes it much more transparent and makes that human interaction more evidence-based.”
It’s not only about keeping the staff happy, either. Managers also want to retain a sense of control. For example, the Rotageek app allows employees to request a shift swap if they have a medical emergency or have been let down by a childminder, for instance. That shift is broadcast to all other eligible employees automatically, so they can volunteer to take the shift, but the manager must approve the swap. “We could entirely automate swaps… but it’s a really fine line between using the tech to make people’s live easy, and not making it intrusive, or disempowering or really creepy.”
Meeting demand
Where Rotageek further pulls ahead of software such as Excel is the external data that can be fed into the rota system. When it comes to judging how many staff are required on the shop floor, for example, many retailers are working on instinct or guesswork. Rotageek can give companies data-based evidence of when they need the most staff on duty and can automatically crank shift patterns to reflect that.
“We do things that are either very time consuming in Excel or simply aren’t possible,” said McCullough. “We can take data feeds of demand – either footfall or transaction data or both… and match that to staff preference,” such as not working Thursdays, for instance.
Many retailers rely on transaction data to calculate when they should have most staff on duty, but that information alone can be misleading. If customers are arriving at your store after work, for example, but can’t find a staff member to help them, the data will reflect a lower turnover even though sales opportunities are literally walking out of the door.
“There are some really smart tech companies now that will help businesses catch people who walk out of stores,” said McCullough. “If you walk in, stay in the store for a bit and walk out it’s really important to know. It might be that you were just browsing, but it might be that the business wasn’t able to meet your needs. Companies like Walkbase who use mobile Wi-Fi pings, can give really granular data about the number of people who walked past a store, the number of people who came in, how long they dwelt, whether they walked out, and they can do all that anonymously.” Rotageek’s data scientists can take that information and apply it the staff rota, ensuring that the maximum number of sales staff are available during those peak hours.
Business intelligence
Indeed, it’s the further development of this type of business intelligence that Rotageek will be working on for the next couple of years. The company is at “an inflexion point”, according to McCullough, having grown from two people in 2014 to 26 staff today. The firm now has offices in London and Melbourne, helping it to provide round-theclock support, and it’s currently going through a round of fundraising to keep growing the business.
“We’ve got a couple of really interesting options in the next year,” said McCullough. “Although we do scheduling, actually what we do for businesses at a high level is allow them to predict demand. For example, we’ve developed a flow model that can help customers predict when their A&E departments become crowded. We’ll allow managers to make much better, data-informed decisions… to make sure they’re making the most optimum decisions in terms of patient care.”
He might have surrendered his licence to practice to become software developer, but it seems you can’t take the doctor out of McCullough.
Rotageek can give companies data-based evidence of when they will need the most staff on duty