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Building Manager Events Scheduling/Task List
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Building Manager Events Scheduling/Task List
Hi all! My name is Jenna Small and I’m the Assistant Director of Campus Operations at Merrimack College. I attended Merrimack for my undergrad, worked as a Building Manager, and have now been in this professional position for about a year and a half. I’m curious to see how other institutions are managing their student Building Managers schedule/task list.
One of my primary responsibilities is creating a weekly schedule for our 30+ Building Managers across 3 areas and 8 buildings on campus. Our campus currently uses EMS for almost all conference & events management. First, I open EMS, examine the ‘Book’ and run reports for the ‘Setup Worksheet’ (one day at a time) and pull ‘Banquet event Orders’ for any event with a special setup. Then, I open a Google Doc where I will manually write the entire week’s schedule by reading the ‘Setup Worksheet’ report in EMS and typing out every event greet, setup, and breakdown. Then, I will add in any ‘Banquet event Orders’ and/or diagrams as PDFs linked in the Doc. This Schedule Doc is then saved to a Google Drive folder where our Building Managers can access it and check items off the schedule as they complete them.
This whole process was new to me when I began here but has been conducted roughly the same way for at least 15 years. Now the college, our department, and events across all of campus have grown significantly so I’m wondering if there is an easier way to be doing all of this. During the school year, it takes a lot of my time and can often be tedious rewriting details and saving/combining hundreds of PDFs with setup notes and diagrams. Then, we also run into trouble sometimes when event details are changed last minute in EMS, and I have to scramble to examine the details and rewrite/redo these details in our Schedule Doc.
I would greatly appreciate if anyone can share their experiences with creating schedules/task lists for student Building Managers. I’d really like to make this entire process easier for professional and student staff alike. Thanks in advance!
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2 Replies
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Hi Jenna!
Is the report something the building managers can run themselves daily? We have a much smaller scale of events between our buildings, but our Building Managers run the report for the next day as a closing task each night, which includes the setup details and notes for each reservation that day. Then, each shift, the students are expected to look at the report and highlight what is taking place during their shift. This isn’t a perfect process whatsoever, and I think writing things out for them could be another helpful way, but this way we have a step back from having to write things out for them, since we already do it on the report.Our checklist is more general, so it includes “check the ops report for reservation-related tasks during your shift”.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 4 weeks ago by Kerry Raffetto.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 4 weeks ago by
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Hi Jenna!
Similar to Kerry, we also have the Building Managers run the Setup Worksheets when they come on shift. We also switched over to Mazevo a couple years ago (strongly recommend and basically just an updated version of EMS) and they added my request to put a link to diagrams in the setup worksheets (yay!). Before when we had EMS though, we would just have “See Diagram” as the setup in that event in EMS and then the diagrams were accessible to the Building Managers from where the Event Planners saved them.
If there are events I’m really concerned about I talk about it in our weekly meeting and put extra notes in the log so they have more clarity on the event. I have a specific tab in our OneNote called “Upcoming Dates” that building managers check at close and add to the log for the next day. This allows me to write notes for the future, so I can cross it off of my mental checklist. We also have notes in Mazevo, but sometimes they need multiple reminders.
I’m also curious if these buildings have set schedules or sounds like maybe as needed based on events? If any of your buildings have set schedules, it might be easiest to schedule for the whole semester. I moved to this model last year and while it’s hours intensive on the front end during the summer or January breaks, I saved a lot of hours of scheduling during the semester. It also gave the responsibility for coverage back to the students, as they had to find coverage for their shifts, but they knew this well in advance. This gave me more time back during the semester when I need it the most and the students appreciated knowing their expected shifts and could plan their lives accordingly.
Lastly, I will say in recent years I’ve move more to a checklist approach in our daily logs. While Building Managers are still expected to complete room resets and event check-ins based on the Setup worksheet, I’ve found that having actual check lists (for non-Mazevo items) that they can check off has been more necessary to make sure tasks are getting completed. For reference Building Manager – Monday Log and Tasks.pdf (link will expire Sept. 28 based on campus IT security settings)
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This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by Deanna Cahoon-Draus. Reason: Adding link
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This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by
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