Skip to main content
Every Duty Plan, whether you build it by hand or Auto Duty builds it for you, moves through the same stages. This page is the map — use it to see where a specific question fits before you go looking for the answer.

​
The stages

1

Configure doctors

Add doctors and keep their profiles current — department, seniority, hour limits, excluded shift types. The engine reads this on every generation.
2

Configure shifts

Define Shift Requirements (individual shifts) and, optionally, combine them into a reusable Shift Schedule.
3

Configure requirements and rules

Set staffing requirements per shift and the work, rest, and fairness rules the engine must respect. See Roster constraints.
4

Create a Duty Plan

Open the creation wizard and set the dates, shifts, team, and rules for this period. Or let Auto Duty do this on a schedule.
5

Collect availability and leave

Doctors submit availability, leave, and shifts to avoid for the period. Only Approved leave is treated as a hard block.
6

Generate

The engine solves the roster against the current doctors, shifts, and rules. This is when approved leave, excluded shifts, and every constraint are actually applied — a Draft roster comes out, or a Failed status if no valid schedule exists.
7

Review

Check coverage, workload, and flagged conflicts on the Draft before anyone else sees it.
8

Publish

The roster becomes visible to your team, with a shareable public link. See What happens after publishing.
9

Edit, swap, or handle changes

Real life happens after publish: manual edits for admin exceptions, duty swaps for doctor-to-doctor changes.

​
What can still change, and when

The engine reads doctor profiles, shift definitions, and approved leave fresh on every generation — it doesn’t watch for changes in between. That has one important consequence:
Editing a doctor profile, a Shift Requirement, a Shift Schedule, or approving leave does not change a Duty Plan that has already been generated. The edit is picked up the next time that Duty Plan is generated or regenerated (for example, via Retry) — not retroactively.
For example: if you approve a leave request after a roster is already published, the roster is not automatically updated. You’ll need to edit it manually or regenerate. See Approving leave. If you’re not sure whether a specific change reached a specific Duty Plan, open that Duty Plan and check it directly, rather than assuming.

​
Next steps

Create your first Duty Plan

Walk through the four-step wizard.

Automate it

Let Auto Duty run this lifecycle on a repeating schedule.

PlanMyRounds terminology

Look up any term used on this page.

Duty Plan generation failed

What to check when the Generate step doesn’t produce a valid schedule.