The customer's summer

A team split between the Gulf and Europe has two summers, and they do not line up.

The Gulf half left in July. The schools closed, the heat arrived, and anyone who could go went. The office in Dubai or Riyadh is at its emptiest right now and stays that way until the second half of the month. The European half worked through July and is away now, because August is the month Europe stops.

I have sat in teams like this, and the rota always gets built the same way: around whichever office the boss sits in. If the boss is in the Gulf, the plan assumes the world stopped in July and restarts when the Gulf does, in the second half of August, which is the exact fortnight London is empty. If the boss is in London, August is sacred and July is a normal working month, so the Gulf half spends July covering a city that has already left.

Both versions have the same flaw. They are planned around where the staff are, and the staff are not the point.

Somewhere there is a customer, and her summer is a third thing. She might be in Manchester, with two children who go back in the first week of September and a uniform order that has to arrive before then. She might be in Riyadh, with a school run expected to start again in the last week of this month. She has a date. It is on neither office's holiday chart, and she does not care which half of the team is on leave the week the parcel is due.

So I build the rota backwards from her calendar: the week her summer ends, and who is at a desk that week.

The only summer that matters is the customer's, and it is in neither office.