A fair-rostering platform for Microsoft 365

An operations team needed to keep a duty roster running across two daily shifts, every day of the week, for a team of around a dozen staff — and they were doing it by hand in a spreadsheet.

That sounds simple until the real constraints show up. Not everyone can work every shift: some staff are only ever rostered mornings, some only afternoons, some either — a hard, physical constraint, not a preference. Everyone still needs a fair share of the workload, but "fair" can't just mean an even morning/afternoon split, because that would penalise someone who's structurally only available for one shift type. Leave, accrued time off and short-notice unavailability all have to be respected without ever leaving a shift silently uncovered. When someone becomes unavailable, the team needs to resolve it themselves — swap with a colleague or post the shift for anyone eligible to claim — without a manager approving every routine handover, but without that self-service creating double-bookings or bypassing eligibility rules either. And whatever got built had to live inside the organisation's existing Microsoft 365 environment: no new infrastructure, no new vendor, nothing outside what IT already manages and secures.

Off-the-shelf workforce-scheduling tools solve pieces of this. Very few solve the actual fairness problem — most leave "fair" as a manual judgement call exercised while a manager drags shifts around a calendar, rather than something the system actually optimises for.