How Mammen Family Public Library cut routine shift changes from 10–15 minutes to about 2

One morning at Mammen, in five steps:

1. Montana isn't in the building.
2. One scheduling admin is on PTO. Another is running late.
3. Staff call out, and the schedule has to change.
4. It can only be edited from inside the library, and nobody with access is there.
5. The staffer who answers the phone writes out the rest of the day's schedule. By hand.

It wasn't the first last-minute paper schedule. When the old software's server went down, they did the same thing, once for an entire weekend.

“I'd like to be able to update the schedule immediately whether I'm at the library or not,” Montana wrote afterward.

Montana had recently stepped into the director role. One of the first things that surprised her was how much of the job was scheduling.

Between Montana and Kellie, it took about 10 hours every two weeks: roughly half an hour per person, every workday.

Most of that wasn't building the schedule. It was changes: swaps, call-ins, PTO, each one its own edit.

Kellie handled most of it in between everything else. “I spend a lot of short increments of time working on things in between other things when I am at the front desk,” she said. A single shift change took her 10–15 minutes. “I would have to click each desk location 15 times to make a change.”

And once a change was made, nobody saw it until they refreshed. That meant an all-staff chat asking everyone to refresh, or someone walking to every computer to do it.

On top of that was the quieter cost: the mental load of knowing, at any moment, where everyone was, which scheduling texts needed answering, and when the schedule needed updating next.

Schedule3W is widely used in small and mid-sized public libraries, and it served Mammen for years. Some parts could be viewed on the web, but editing had to happen on a desktop inside the library's network, so the schedule could only be changed from inside the building, usually on Montana's work machine.

Pricing was another pain point. Mammen's plan came in blocks of 20 users, and the library was already at 40: its most regular volunteers were in the system as users, along with some service points entered as staff. When Mammen hired two new people, it had to buy another block of 20.

Mammen's needs weren't exotic, but they were specific. Kickstool does every one of them today:

• Schedule ~25 staff plus ~20 volunteers, “who we schedule like staff”
• See multiple service points at a glance, with who's working today and when
• Divide hours into assignments: Shelving, Cataloging, Outreach, Information Desk
• Add notes to assignments (a homebound outreach visit, a pop-up library at the park)
• Put more than one person on a service point
• Mark PTO, conferences, and professional development clearly
• Edit from anywhere, on the web

Before Mammen ever talked to Kickstool, Montana did what directors do: she asked the field. When a peer asked a listserv for scheduling software recommendations, she watched the thread closely. “I was so hopeful people would recommend something better — but that didn't happen!”

She weighed building the schedule herself in Google Sheets so she could reach it from anywhere. The sticking point was recurring shifts: “I think I would get annoyed doing each month manually.”

General-purpose scheduling tools weren't a fit either. Most price per user, which means a library pays for every volunteer it relies on.

Mammen became Kickstool's founding library, and Montana and Kellie's requirements list became the product's first spec. Today Mammen runs the same Kickstool any new library gets.

Changes. “It used to take me 10–15 minutes for a single shift change. Now it takes me 2,” Kellie said. Montana agrees: “Fixing it in Kickstool takes two minutes.”

Building the schedule. Once she got the hang of Kickstool, Kellie estimates building the schedule takes about half the time it used to, including adding staff and volunteers.

Access. Every scheduling admin can edit the schedule from a phone, wherever they are. The morning nobody could edit the schedule can't happen anymore.

Everyone sees changes right away. No more refresh reminders. “Now I can just change things and not have to worry about it,” Montana said. Staff find their own assignments, too. “People can check their desk assignments easily by just clicking the drop down instead of scrolling up and down our old screen,” Kellie said. “It is easy to see who is where with the graph.”

Reporting. Questions that used to mean paging through the calendar week by week with a tally now take seconds: how much of someone's time is on desk versus off desk, hours per person, volunteer hours, and time away broken out by PTO, training, and other reasons.

Recently, two circulation staff had PTO in the same two-week stretch. Kellie braced for it. She even booked a meeting with Montana to work through it.

She didn't need it. Staff claimed several open shifts on their own. Kellie could see every gap and who was free, and she dragged people where she needed them.

Montana's days are still full. People still call out. Someone still wants to swap a shift. That part Kickstool can't change, but can make it a lot easier when it does happen.

What's gone is the scramble. A change comes in, and she makes it from wherever she is. It takes a couple of minutes, everyone sees it right away, and she gets back to the rest of her job.

Support requests get routed straight to the person building the product. “The fact that I could send a question and get a response in just a few days — usually with the fix/update already in place as well — is a total game-changer,” Montana said.

Mammen is one building, a bookmobile, a few dozen people, and a small team that was losing hours every week to schedule changes. If that sounds familiar, this is the library Kickstool was built around. Especially if you're:

• A director who's newer to the chair and startled by how much of it is scheduling
• The person your director hands the schedule to, fitting it in between desk shifts
• A library that's been on the same desktop software for years

Kickstool is priced per branch, not per person, so adding volunteers doesn't add cost. See pricing.