The dreaded AV scheduling spreadsheet. It’s an AV scheduler best friend and their worst enemy. It contains all of the information you need to keep your project on track, on budget, and on time, helping you manage all of your crew management processes. But, as handy a tool as it is, it’s also outdated. While your Excel scheduling spreadsheet may keep your AV project on track, it also may stagger behind industry trends and technological advancements in the business world that could improve your scheduling process and bring you even better insights.

Live events are make or break. Your AV team and crew gets one chance to either make it all go right the first time or miss the mark. Adding to the challenge, live events can be unpredictable with deadlines and scopes that are constantly moving. While these obstacles can be hard to overcome, you can defeat them and set your live event up for success with careful AV crew scheduling, planning, management, and preparation.

On an AV project, your crew is your most important asset. Selecting the right group of contractors can be the difference between an event, integration, or tour that goes off without a hitch, and one that becomes a financial and time-leeching drain on your team. In order to build a crew that will deliver a successful project, AV schedulers must consider and verify a combination of factors including work history, experience, special skills, and recommendations. This is where contractor verification systems come into play.

Coordinating a group of people to do anything can be hectic -- especially in the world of AV. Between communications, multiple databases, availability, and evolving project requirements, simply scheduling your crew for a project can cost you a substantial amount of time and money. Fortunately, the addition of a crew scheduling and management software can alleviate many of these scheduling tasks and help you manage your AV crew with greater ease. When introducing a crew scheduling software designed specifically for AV projects, there are a few stand-out features you should expect to find that will instantly take the stress out of crew coordination and scheduling.

Scheduling AV crews is a process that involves a lot of communication and organization. The larger the crew and the bigger the project, the more difficult scheduling becomes. Time consuming tasks like searching through records and databases to find the appropriate crew members, creating and sharing schedules for multiple crews, and making last minute scheduling changes can put a major strain on AV schedulers as events draw near. However, many of these scheduling pains can be solved by introducing the proper scheduling system. Here are some of the most common AV workforce scheduling pains, and the tips and tools you need to solve them.

Independent AV contractors are highly valued contributors to the AV industry. Working with contractors on AV projects allows you to access a wider pool of audio-visual skills sets and experience levels, expand your team as necessary, and meet project deadlines when demand is high. Despite all of the benefits they provide to AV schedulers in charge of meeting project needs, securing contractors can also require more upfront work on your part.  

As an audio visual scheduler, it's important to approach each AV project with an open mind so you can cater to the individual crewing needs of each project. How you coordinate a new project often depends on the type of event you’re crewing and who is needed to achieve the project's completion and success. In order to make this process easy and efficient, regardless of the project, there are a number of tips you should follow -- from understanding the different positions and their qualities to automating scheduling. Utilize these audio visual technician hiring and coordination tips to ease the crewing process from start to finish.

For some AV schedulers and planners, arranging contracts and verifying insurance for audio visual crews is foreign territory — packing with it a hefty box of intimidating questions and variables -— especially when it comes to insurance. Rather than figuring out how to contract and insure freelancers properly, AV companies will often "hire" them as temporary Part Time employees to make the process simpler. While this may serve as a simple, upfront solution to a confusing hiring dilemma, doing this actually requires far more paperwork and is 2x to 3x more expensive. However, working with AV contractors doesn’t have to create extra work or complications. By becoming more familiar with AV contractor insurance systems and requirements, you can rest easy knowing that your crew has the necessary coverage so you’ll be prepared for any project related accident.

With the wide array of workforce management softwares available, almost all aspects of employee and independent contractor management can become streamlined and centralized. Now that mobile devices and technology tools have become more powerful and mainstream, there are a lot of options to be more efficient with workforce management — which is great news for the AV planners and schedulers who are currently relying on outdated scheduling methods, or even those trying to fit their approach into a industry non-specific software that doesn’t understand their unique needs.

Managing and verifying invoices and payouts on AV projects has a tendency to get overwhelming. This is especially true when your crew is made up of both independent contractors and internal employees and you’re tasked at tracking both. Regardless of inefficiencies manual time tracking presents, AV schedulers are expected to collect and manage time sheets for both freelancers and employees quickly, efficiently, and accurately.