How do You Create a Great Timetabling Team?

In timetabling, teamwork is the dreamwork.

It’s a stressful job. Deadlines can be tight. Last minute changes can be frequent. On top of that, you’re often dealing with lots of different personalities within your institution – and their frequent requests!

You want your team to be strong, so that you can cope with whatever comes your way.

One way to achieve this is by working out the strengths of each person in your team, and how these can be used.

Say, for example, particular colleagues are great when it comes to diplomacy, and being able to say no to outlandish requests. These might be your super-power when it comes to managing your internal stakeholders.

Your problem solver who’s calm under pressure might be your go-to when last minute changes throw an entire schedule up in the air!

By understanding the strengths within your team you can also spot any gaps, and any opportunities to cross-train and build its overall capability.

All sounding good so far?

So how do you start to work out where individual strengths lie?

Over at The Timetabling Academy, we run a series of workshops that explore team development, and we start with this one simple exercise.

Each member is asked to list the qualities they feel makes an ideal timetabler.

Of course the point here is that there is no such thing as a perfect list – or that one person should carry all the qualities. But doing the exercise gets people thinking about some of the useful skills for the job, and how as a team you might combine those skills.

Here’s an example that came out of one of our recent workshops!

Next time you meet as a timetabling team, why not give the exercise a go? Print out our downloadable PDF, give everyone a copy, and ask them to list their own thoughts.

Then share your ideas as a team and combine them to create your institution’s ‘ideal timetabler’. From there, you can start to identify who in your team carries each of the qualities, and how that might help you assign roles in the future.