Department & care
Department schedule and organization
Specify before building, cross-check assignments with the schedule without ever writing to it, spot conflicts every week.
The problem
Clinical sessions, on-call shifts, consultations, examinations, staff meetings, absences: a department’s schedule is a shared, sensitive object, often managed in a home-made tool. A careless change affects the whole team.
Step-by-step method
- Have a readable specification written before any change to the tool: columns, controlled vocabularies (drop-down lists), a filled-in example.
- Keep a “decisions made / pending” list: build only once ambiguities have been resolved.
- Test before publishing: Claude produces a preview, checks half-days and the consistency of names (against a directory), then you publish it yourself.
- Read the schedule every week, read-only: Claude cross-checks your academic commitments (lectures, juries, conferences) with your clinical sessions and flags conflicts.
Going further
- The full schedule case, step by step
- Building the department’s scheduling tool
- Absences, freed rooms and stand-ins
- Delivering, checking and publishing the schedule
- Organizing the department’s staff meetings
Deliverable
An approved specification, a tool that evolves without breaking, and a weekly conflict alert.
Safeguards
The department schedule remains strictly read-only for the AI. Changes go through the person in charge.
Starter prompt
Here is this month’s schedule (export) and my academic calendar. List the conflicts between my clinical sessions and my teaching or conference commitments, without changing anything. For each conflict, propose a solution to submit to the person in charge of the schedule.