Introduction
The larger your event schedule becomes, the more likely you are to have challenges managing your speaker’s schedules or your room bookings. Everyone has their own scheduling constraints, and moving sessions from place to place, or to different times, can create scheduling conflicts. Because Grenadine Event Management Software allows teams of people to work together on an event plan, scheduling conflicts can also be created by different team members moving different sessions or assigning the same people accidentally.
Types of Scheduling Conflicts
Grenadine helps you deal with event scheduling conflicts by identifying the following:
- Double-booked rooms
- Double-booked speakers
- Back-to-back bookings
- “Booked against” restrictions (an advanced functionality)
- Session Conflicts
- Time Constraint Conflicts
Double-booked rooms
A double-booked room happens when more than one session is booked in the same room, at the same time. When identifying double-booked rooms, Grenadine includes full and partial double bookings. For example, you may have one session booked in Ballroom A from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, and a second session is also booked in Ballroom A from 9:30 AM to 10:00 AM. In this example, the double-booked room conflict for room Ballroom A starts at 9:30 AM.
Double-booked speakers
Double-booked speakers are identified in a similar manner to double-booked rooms. When a person is booked as a speaker (or moderator, reserved, etc.) on more than one session at the same time, their double-booking is flagged. Grenadine identifies full (double-booked during the whole duration of the session and partial (double-booked during a portion of the duration of the session) double-booking conflicts.
Back-to-back bookings
A back-to-back booking is not technically a scheduling conflict but can mean that you have an inconvenient or unrealistic booking in your schedule. For example, if you book Bob Smith back to back presentations with one occurring from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, with the next from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, this may or may not be realistic because he may need to stay behind to answer questions or walk a long distance to reach the room of the second presentation.
Grenadine identifies such back-to-back bookings so that you are aware of their presence, and may choose to modify your schedule if necessary.
Advanced: “Booked against” restriction
The “booked against” scheduling conflict is a special kind of conflict. When preparing your schedule, you may send out surveys to prospective speakers asking them when they would “not like to be booked”. They can also specify a special restriction that is a session conflict (i.e. “do not book me against …”) or a time conflict (i.e. “do not book me at specific times”). When checking scheduling conflicts, Grenadine will flag such scheduling conflicts, allowing you to react accordingly.
Below are a couple of examples of a “booked against” restriction:
Session conflict
- Bob Smith specifies that he “would not like to be booked against the Keynote presentation”. At the time when you collected this information, the date and time of the keynote presentation might not have been known.
- As part of your planning, you proceed to book Bob Smith as a speaker on a workshop starting at 9:30 AM on Monday.
- There is no immediate booking conflict.
- Later on, in your planning, you decide that the Keynote presentation will happen on Monday from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM.
- The booked against restriction that was set for Bob will then flag a scheduling conflict starting at 9:30 AM on Monday because Bob said that he did not want to be booked against the keynote presentation, and the keynote schedule is now known.
Time constraint conflict
- Sue Smith specifies that she is not available from 9 am to noon on the first day of the conference.
- If Sue is assigned to a session that overlaps with this time period a time constraint conflict will be indicated.
How to View Scheduling Conflict Issues
There are two places where you can view scheduling conflicts:
- When managing an event, go to the Schedule -> Grid & scheduling conflicts menu.
- In the Reports section, look at the reports available in the Schedule conflicts report section.