Hi folks, looking for advice on the crew planning app.
I would love to be able to add potential hires to the plan, without necessarily setting up dud shotgun accounts, as its not confirmed yet whether or not these people will be needed. For example creating Freelancer 1, Freelancer 2 ect, and moving them into projects as needed for identifying future recruiting needs. There would be no need for full SG profiles for this until we actually hire someone, so looking to see what others have done in this instance.
@Caoimhe_Maguire, hi and welcome to the community ! What you’ve described seems similar to how the app can work, and is actually a common use-case we’ve seen. We put together a topic on this in our Producer Series:
From this topic, you’ll see that you can create users like “Freelancer 1”, “Freelancer 2”, etc, place them in the appropriate department, and the keep those users disabled until they are hired (you can use your email address or another as a palceholder). Then, once you are hire that person and they become “real”, you can edit their profile/email/etc and send them a Welcome email. But, while they’re a disabled account, you can filter by that in the Crew Planning Advanced Filter. Does this type of workflow suit what you’re after?
Hey Caoimhe, I work at Shotgun, I love this question - it’s an area we’ve been thinking about.
I have a question about some detail on this: when you invite “Freelancer 1” to your plan, is it enough to call them just “Freelancer 1” or is what they do (their area of expertise or skill set) important as part of that picture?
Hey @shaynad, there’s one thing that I don’t like about using the disabled account approach. When you include disabled accounts, you also see (by design) the accounts of people who have left the studio - and those tend to accumulate after a few years!
@Govind_Kalburgi, I hear you and definitely agree that a best practice here would be to keep accounts “clean”. The idea behind this approach and creating these placeholders is to eventually turn them into real hires. But, that’s not always the case, and Shotgun is flexible enough to use placeholders more long term if that suits a workflow better than turning them into real accounts.
To help limit noise across Shotgun, but still have the ability to use Crew Planning with disabled placeholders, you can control filtering of autocompletion by status with entity/multi-entity fields, so that disabled users are filtered from any person entity type field (like Assigned to, etc). Check out Site Preferences > Filtering > Autocomplete Omit Statuses. If you’d like to filter people with the disabled status, you can add HumanUser:dis to the list. And that should keep your assignment options clean.
Hey @shaynad, this is how our site is currently setup.
I was actually referring to what happens within the Crew Planning app. When enabling the Disabled accounts, it’s true that the app will show you your placeholder accounts. But, it will also show you accounts of the people who’ve left the studio…
Hey @shaynad, yes personal filters can definitely come to the rescue here.
Even if the naming is not consistent, you could filter by people’s Contract Start and/or End dates.
Can I be greedy and say that it would be great if we could have Saved Filters for the Crew Planning app as well? Studios can build a few presets like this for all users to use.
@Govind_Kalburgi,
In order for us to keep the Crew Planning App clean, we just add a tag called “crew-planning” to any user (active or disabled) that we want to show up in the app, and filter by that from the “Advanced Filters” at the top of the app. I think that should work to keep actual disabled users out of the app but allow “disabled” potential hires to show up.
Sorry for the lack of response, I was away for a few weeks. These are great suggestions, looking forward to delving into it a bit more. Thanks for everyones input.
! What you’ve described seems similar to how the app can work, and is actually a common use-case we’ve seen. We put together a topic on this in our Producer Series:
