You build a running order by writing the constraints down first and fitting routines to them: how long each piece runs, how long the stage takes to reset, which divisions must stay together for the judges, how the warm-up rooms rotate, and how much time a performer needs between two costumes. A list you drag by hand is not a schedule. It is somewhere to keep the schedule after a person has worked it out.
The constraints, in the order they bite
- Routine length and stage reset. An ensemble needs the boards cleared and props moved; a solo does not.
- Costume changes. The same performer in a solo and a group number needs enough between them to change, and how much depends on the costume.
- Divisions and levels. Judges score better when a division runs together, and awards are easier to announce.
- Warm-up rooms. Rooms rotate on their own timetable, and a group left standing cold in a corridor is a complaint waiting to happen.
- Travel. A school driving in for a morning session should not also be on stage last thing at night.
- Judge breaks, panel changes and the awards block.
Why a general tool fails at this
General scheduling and event products hold a list of items with times against them. They do not know that two of those items share a dancer, that one needs the stage struck, or that a division must not be split. So the constraints live in the head of whoever builds the order, and the tool merely records the result.
That is why the running order gets built over several evenings in the weeks beforehand, why only one person can really rebuild it, and why a change on the morning is so expensive.
The morning it changes
A studio arrives two routines short. A soloist is unwell. A session overruns and the afternoon has to move. Each of those breaks the same constraints you spent evenings satisfying, and by then the person who understands them is on the floor with a clipboard.
A system built around your own rules can rebuild the order from those rules rather than from memory, and then tell everyone who needs to know from the same change: the affected directors, the stage manager, the tabulation table and the doors.
What the schedule has to feed
- The public programme, and the times studios plan their day around.
- The stage manager's call sheet and the warm-up room rota.
- The judges' sheets, in the order the panel will see them.
- Tabulation, so a scratch never sits inside a total.
- Admission, where sessions are sold separately.
When those come from separate products, somebody retypes the order into each of them on the Friday night, and every later change is retyped as well. That retyping, rather than the scheduling itself, is where most of a weekend's mistakes come from.
Before you buy another scheduling tool
- Write your constraints down as rules in plain words. If a tool cannot express them, it cannot build your order.
- Ask what happens when a routine is scratched an hour before the session starts.
- Ask which other parts of the weekend read the schedule without anyone copying it.
- Count what the scheduling function costs you, because it is often a tier bought for the whole year and used for a few days.
Do that counting properly before deciding anything. Our software bill calculator, a free calculator, takes what you are billed per entry, per event or per judging tablet and shows the yearly and three-year totals.
The running order is the part of a competition weekend most worth owning, because it is made entirely of your rules and nobody else's. Our guide to owning your software explains where that is worth doing and where it is not, and our page for performing arts competitions describes what else on the weekend can be rebuilt and what stays rented.