How do you schedule in a roster environment

[Joel of the Outback]

I am scheduling a project at a fly-in fly-out 365 day a year operation that
runs an 8 days on / 6 days off roster. Crews fly in for 8 days of work, then
fly out for 6 days off. Some crews work Tuesday to Tuesday, some Wednesday
to Wednesday, and some Thursday to Thursday. Each crew has an opposite crew
that works the other side of the 8-6 roster, so on roster handover days (i.e.
the Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the crew) everyone is here,
and the entire operation is handed over to the incoming crew. As you can
see, there are 6 crews, and as a result, I think there will be 6 different
resource calendars for this project (2 for each of the Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday crews)

My questions are:

1 - is there a quicker way to set up an 8/6 roster in Project? Right now I
am using the Wizard to manually set working and non-working days for the
duration of the project. This is tedious and prone to error. If the project
extends beyond the plan, someone will need to cotton on to the fact that the
calendar needs to be updated as well or the whole thing could fall in a heap.

2 - what happens when a team member changes crews / rosters? Occaisionally
a team member, usually a senior manager, will go to work on the opposite
roster. I am concerned that if I change their resource schedule it will
back-date itself and mess up all the start / finish dates that have already
gone past.

Many thanks for your assistance,

Joel of the Outback.

 

[George King]

Each resource can have it's own calendar and that's what I would do.
Activities they are assigned to will follow the resource calendar.

As for the guys that change crews - I would not change their calendar,
because as you stated, it will change everything prior also. I would make
another resource, call them JoeSmith1 and JoeSmith2. JoeSmith1's calendar
would become all non-worked after he changes crews and JoeSmith2's calendar
would be all non-worked until the day he started on the other crew.

You may have to make the non-worked extend for a year or so to get the
non-worked portion before the start of the project, or after the finish of
the project.