THE BENEFITS OF SCHEDULING

What are some of the benefits of having a schedule/ scheduling system in place? One answer is PREDICT-ABILITY. A scheduling system makes everyone's job easier by adding predictability to the AIS environment. To your superiors, it provides a means of holding down costs through better use of personnel and equipment. Other possible benefits of scheduling areas follows:

l Effective use of all AIS resources;

l Increased throughput;

l Decreased turnaround time;

l User deadlines met;

l Users made responsible for providing input on schedule;

l Improved communications with users;

l Avoidance of overloading and underuse of resources;

l Job delays more readily apparent;

l Documentation of scheduling deviations and their causes;

l Reduced confusion within the AIS facility;

l Better use of multiprogramming capabilities;

l AIS facility able to review its own effectiveness;

l Predictability of the effects of an increased workload; and

l Predictability of future equipment and personnel needs.

All of these benefits can be achieved through an effective scheduling system.

THE SCHEDULING PROCESS

The scheduling process has three moving parts: you, the information, and the method. Let's look at each.

THE SCHEDULER

As scheduler, you must be well organized. Scheduling jobs through the various work areas within your AIS facility is much like scheduling the events of your own personal day-to-day life, except it's a lot more technical and involved. You set aside predetermined amounts of time to do certain things. Call it "a things-to-do list" if you will.

It would be nice if your things-to-do list consisted of nothing more than having to accept incoming requests from the users, finding holes to plug their jobs into the schedule, and waiting for the jobs to show up on the completed list. If that were the case, your things-to-do list would be relatively small and seemingly uncomplicated. If your AIS facility has such an abundance of resources that any demands made by the users can be easily met, then your facility is probably wasting resources and incurring more expenses than it should. This is probably not the case. To the contrary, your command will probably have just enough resources or too few.

As scheduler, you must decide which jobs to process first, second, third, and so on. Which jobs can be run together? You need to determine the job mix. How big are the jobs in terms of memory use? What resources do they use-disk drives, tape drives, printer, and so on? How long will each job run? In what environment must each job be run?

Under ideal conditions, you can work through your things-to-do list in a relatively short period of time and come up with a workable schedule. In reality, however, things do not necessarily go according to plan or, rather, according to schedule. Equipment, other people, and outside influences are all problem areas.

A lack of productivity and missed deadlines can be caused by unexpected problems, such as:

o Late submission of input from the user;

l Waiting for data entry to complete a job step;

* Having to locate a missing file in the library;

@ Job stream parameters entered into the system incorrectly.

You may face any number of these and other situations each day. You should have a backup or contingency plan in the event you lose a piece of hardware. For example, if the fastest printer is down, will the user be satisfied with one printed copy now and the remaining copies printed tomorrow? Or is there another AIS facility in your immediate area that will let you use its printer? It will be your job to prepare the most realistic schedule you can, and then be ready to adjust it. What tools will you have to help you prepare the schedules? What information will you need? What methods can you use? In the following section, we talk about the types of information you will need to prepare a schedule. Then we explore a few of the scheduling methods you might use.