Sites & Teams — planning several workstreams together

What is a Site?

A Site is a location or grouping (for example "Porto" or "Lisbon contact centre"). You assign workstreams to a site so they can be planned together. Manage sites from the Teams page.

What is a Team?

A Team is a subset of one site's workstreams that you plan together as a single operation — one combined capacity plan, one schedule, and one budget. Create a team when the same agents (or the same plan) cover several channels or queues.

Creating a team

Open the Teams page (top navigation → Teams).
Click New team, give it a name, choose its Site, and select the member workstreams to include.
Pick a planning mode: Blended or Separate (you can switch any time with the toggle on the team page).

What is blended planning?

Blended planning (also called the combined plan mode) means using a single pool of multi-skilled agents to cover several channels at the same time. Instead of staffing each queue independently, blended planning assumes that during quiet periods in one channel, agents can pick up work from another.

For example, a blended voice + email team uses agents to answer calls during peak hours, and those same agents process email tickets during the quieter slots between calls. The Erlang C model already accounts for voice idle time, so Turnella absorbs the email FTE into that idle capacity rather than adding it on top.

Blended planning saves headcount when you mix voice with an async channel (email or back-office). Two voice queues cannot share the same person in real time, so blending voice + voice gives the same result as separate planning — that is correct, not a bug.

Blended vs Separate

Separate staffs each member workstream on its own and adds them up. This is always the safe number.
Blended assumes the same multi-skilled agents handle several channels, so asynchronous work (email/back-office) is absorbed into voice idle time — fewer agents at the peak.
Blending only produces a saving when you mix voice with an async channel (email or back-office). Two voice queues cannot share the same person in real time, so for a voice-only team Blended and Separate show the same number — that is correct, not a bug.
Blended figures are an estimate. They assume your routing platform supports blended queues and your agents are multi-skilled — validate before acting. The separate figure is always the safe one to plan against.
Standing backlog is NOT included in team plans. If a member workstream has a standing backlog (set in its Backlog Clearance Planner), the team plan covers incoming demand only — Turnella shows an explicit warning banner on the team card and detail page. The extra clearance FTE is sized on that workstream's own Staffing needs tab and must be added on top of the blended total.

Combined view vs a Team — estimate vs actual

The Combined view on the Dashboard is a quick, read-only estimate of staffing several workstreams together. It does not build a schedule.
A Team (on the Teams page) is where you build the actual combined plan: one schedule, coverage, and budget that you can edit and keep.

How do I see the capacity of both (or all) workstreams together?

On the team page, the top "Peak agents required" card is the combined capacity. Use the Blended / Separate toggle to compare the two. To see each workstream's full per-interval staffing curve (not just the peak), open that workstream and go to its Staffing needs tab.

How do I see the team budget / weekly cost?

The team page has a Weekly cost card. If it shows "—", it means no member workstream has an hourly rate yet, so there is nothing to cost. To fix it:

Open a member workstream → Settings tab.
Set a Default rate (your loaded hourly cost), and the on-cost % if you use one.
Return to the team — the Weekly cost fills in automatically.

You only need a rate on one member for a figure to appear; set rates on every member for an accurate total. You can also see each workstream's own cost on its Cost tab.

The team page has four tabs

The team page is organised as Overview · Agents · Rules · Schedule:

Overview — combined capacity (peak agents required), budget/weekly cost, and a rough demand-shaped shift sketch.
Agents — your team's real saved agents (see below).
Rules — the scheduling rules the official generator obeys.
Schedule — the official schedule (primary) and an advisory channel-mix preview (secondary).

Team agents (Agents tab)

Team agents are real saved employee records attached to the team. They are what the official schedule is built from.

On the Agents tab, click ✦ Generate agents to create several at once. Choose how many, contracted hours/week, employment type, naming style, and optionally channel eligibility, available days, earliest/latest shift times, skills, and an hourly rate. Or click + Add one for a single agent.
After generating, a "Next: configure rules and build a schedule" panel appears with buttons to do exactly that.
Click any agent (or Edit) to set their constraints. Fields are split into "Applied by the official generator" (status, contracted hours, earliest/latest, min/max daily hours, available days, channel eligibility) and "Stored for planning review — not enforced yet" (employment type, role, rate, preferred times, skills, notes).
Archive removes an agent from scheduling without deleting them; Delete is a two-step confirmation (permanent, syncs across devices) — prefer Archive for a temporary removal.

Scheduling rules (Rules tab)

The Rules tab is where you set what the official generator must obey: operating window and days, allowed shift lengths, min/max daily and weekly hours, minimum rest, max consecutive working days, breaks (duration, stagger, max agents on break at once), allow-understaffing, and cost defaults. Use Use recommended rules to apply sensible defaults, or Reset to defaults. Changes save automatically. A red banner warns if a rule combination would block generation (e.g. max daily hours below min). Rules marked (stored — not enforced yet) are saved for review but the current generator does not apply them.

How do I build the official schedule?

On the Schedule tab:

The readiness checklist shows whether you have agents, demand, and rules ready — fix anything outstanding.
Click Build official schedule. Turnella assigns your real saved agents to demand-driven shifts, places staggered breaks, and respects each agent's contracted hours, availability window, available days, and the team rules.
The result shows summary cards (scheduled/unscheduled agents, paid hours, peak coverage, worst gap, warnings), a shift table grouped by date, an agent scheduling result table, and an unscheduled agents list that tells you why each agent wasn't scheduled (not needed, contracted-hours limit, unavailable on demand days, shift-window conflict, max consecutive days, archived, no eligible channel).
Coverage gaps (including late-day demand after 16:00) are flagged with a red warning. Demand that falls on a non-operating day is flagged, not silently dropped.
Export the official roster with Official CSV (<team>-official-schedule-preview.csv). If you change agents, rules, or demand after building, the schedule is marked stale and export is disabled until you rebuild.

Official schedule vs advisory preview

The official schedule uses only your real saved team agents and applies the rules — it is the roster to review for operational use (still a Beta planning aid: review coverage, breaks, skills, contracts, and local labour rules before using it).
The advisory channel-mix preview lower down is illustrative only — not the official roster. It shows how a blended day could split across channels and may use example names; its export is clearly labelled "ADVISORY".

Channel eligibility is coarse

You can set which channels each agent can handle. The generator excludes agents who can handle none of the team's channels and warns when channel eligibility is unset, but it does not yet do full per-channel skill routing — it is a headcount model. A warning appears if a team channel has demand that no eligible agent can cover.

To assign named people to a single workstream's own shifts (separate from team scheduling), use that workstream's Roster tab.

Related reading: Multi-site planning · WFM for blended agents · Multi-channel calculator