• Replies 11 replies
  • Subscribers 2 subscribers
  • Views 9 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related

How do you prevent dispatchers from becoming a bottleneck?

Brandon Okafor
We've got 14 techs in the field and one full-time dispatcher who's starting to burn out. Every scheduling decision flows through her. Every reschedule, every emergency call, every 'can I leave early' request.

This isn't sustainable. My team can't move forward until we solve this.

What are you doing to distribute dispatch decisions? Self-scheduling for senior techs? Regional dispatchers? Automation rules?

Need something that scales without adding headcount 1:1.
Parents
  • Self-scheduling sounds nice until your senior tech books himself into a corner and the dispatcher has to untangle it anyway...

    What we did: shadow dispatcher. Train a second person, even part-time. No single point of failure, and the primary actually takes PTO without everything falling apart.

    Not as elegant as automation but it works.
  • in reply to Ray DeLuca
    Ray's point about untangling is valid — seen it happen. But the shadow approach doubles labor to solve a single-person problem.

    Gwen's framework + these guardrails we added:
    • Hard stops: max 3 self-scheduled jobs per tech per week
    • Review queue: dispatcher sees all self-assignments in daily digest, can flag patterns
    • Reversibility: senior tech status revoked if SLA slips

    Accountability without micromanagement.
Reply
  • in reply to Ray DeLuca
    Ray's point about untangling is valid — seen it happen. But the shadow approach doubles labor to solve a single-person problem.

    Gwen's framework + these guardrails we added:
    • Hard stops: max 3 self-scheduled jobs per tech per week
    • Review queue: dispatcher sees all self-assignments in daily digest, can flag patterns
    • Reversibility: senior tech status revoked if SLA slips

    Accountability without micromanagement.
Children
No Data