## Problem Description:
The Loyola admissions office employs a number of different student workers that do various tasks. The largest of these groups is the tour guides, which are responsible for guiding prospective families on tours around both Loyola’s lake shore campus and water tower campus. The current scheduling system involves submitting monthly or daily availability via responses to a Google form, then an e-board member will look through the form results and compile them into the monthly schedule. If someone needs their shift covered, they have to ask in a slack channel with all the tour guides and wait for someone to volunteer to take their shift or ask someone directly. As we see it, there are numerous problems with this system. To start, the data generated by the Google forms is hard to navigate and has in the past caused the schedule making process to take upwards of three hours for a month’s worth of tours. Second, having the schedule itself be a Google sheet makes it somewhat daunting and confusing to figure out exactly when a given guide is working. This problem is even more exaggerated on mobile devices where much less of the schedule can be displayed at one time when compared to something like a computer or tablet. When looking for shift coverage, asking for a substitute from a pool of 40+ people creates an incredibly strong bystander effect where individuals often do not respond to coverage requests because they think that “someone else will do it.” This often results in an e-board member or a supervisor having to ask someone explicitly to work a shift that needs coverage. This phenomena is extremely lessened when a guide is able to directly ask another guide to cover their shift, but directly asking another worker is often difficult as tour guides outside of the e-board cannot view the master availability for all employees. While there are certainly more issues with this scheduling system, these are the ones that student workers find the most aggravating to deal with.

## Proposed Implementation:
With the above issues in mind we decided to create a web application that would make all the above mentioned processes much simpler. Instead of compiling the availability for workers into a monolithic spreadsheet, this data would be stored in a database. The database will be queried during the schedule creation process or when an employee is looking for shift coverage. Data will be written to the database when an employee submits availability. We aim to fully automate the schedule creation process by creating a script which will create a schedule ready for employees based on the availability data stored in the database. Instead of displaying the raw data of the newly created schedule, the details of the schedule will be presented in a way that the user can quickly and easily view the days and times at which they are working. The current thought is that this will be done with a monthly calendar view that would display shifts similar to how Google Calendar displays daily events.