Noodle shop pre-publish schedule checklist - skill coverage, consecutive days and rest gaps, the broth shift, and confirming every change before the roster goes to the group chat

You are a scheduling review coach for a noodle shop. Every
Friday I finish next week's roster and run a self-check before
posting it to the staff group chat. Turn the checks below into
a pre-publish checklist I tick through - all pass, then send.

Our shop's basics (I will provide before you generate):
- Staff roster: each person / skill tags (noodles, broth,
  register, plating, bussing) / full-time or part-time /
  contractual weekly-hours cap
- Consecutive-days cap: the maximum run of days (I set it,
  e.g., 6)
- Broth firing time and closing time
- Approved time-off and planned leave for next week
- New hires and their trainers

Four groups (every item with a pass standard and a
who-to-move-first when it fails):

1. Skill coverage (any failure here blows up the day the
   sheet goes live):
- At least one noodle cook on duty in every operating slot;
   at least two during the lunch peak
- The early broth shift is staffed by someone who can make
   broth - "still learning" does not count for a solo shift;
   a trainer must be on the same shift
- Someone register-capable in every slot, able to run the
   POS alone at lunch
- The plating/topping station covered at lunch - however
   fast the noodle cook is, the line stalls without a
   plating hand

2. Compliance and stamina:
- Nobody past the consecutive-days cap
- Rest gap between one person's closing shift and the next
   morning's broth shift - combinations below my stated
   minimum get the broth shift re-staffed, never the closing
   shift
- Full-time weekly hours within contract; part-timers
   within agreed hours

3. Communication (done before publishing, not repaired
   after):
- Everyone whose shifts changed versus this week has
   confirmed the change (spoken or messaged - a reply
   counts, silence does not)
- All approved time-off is reflected on the sheet - one
   miss costs a point of trust
- Every new hire has a trainer on every shift

4. Bottom line (no pass, no publish):
- At least two noodle cooks at lunch; if the shop has only
   one person who can pull noodles, flag "single point of
   failure" on the sheet header with a one-line risk note -
   that is the shop's most urgent problem, stated in writing
- Every shift on the sheet carries a name; "TBD" is not a
   name

Output format: four checkable groups, one line per item:
check / pass standard / who to move first on failure (swap
whom, move which slot, or call which part-timer). End with
the three-step publish routine: post to the group, tag each
person whose shifts changed, archive the confirmations.

Prohibitions:
- No "schedule reasonably" or "watch for burnout" items -
  nothing that cannot be ticked yes or no
- No citing labor-law sections - hours compliance is checked
  against my contract and shop rules; legal interpretation
  is not what I am asking you for
- "Who to move first" must name a concrete action (which
  skill class to swap, which slot to move, which
  part-timer to call), never "reassess"

Why it is written this way

Front-loading the checks acknowledges the asymmetric cost of editing a published schedule: before publishing, an edit is your own business; after, it is a round of apologies. And a scheduling supervisor's credibility depletes per incident - change the sheet two weeks running and in week three somebody shows up working the old one; the moment the pass-through window asks "who's on noodles today," the loss has already happened. The real deliverable is not a sheet with fewer errors but a sheet that needs no post-publish edits.

Skill coverage leads because nine out of ten noodle-shop scheduling incidents are "nobody on this slot can pull noodles" or "nobody can open the register." Headcount-adequate-but-skill-poor slots are invisible to any total-headcount glance; they only surface by walking each slot against skill tags. "Still learning does not count for a solo shift" is phrasing bought with a real loss: a half-trained cook alone over a stockpot of old broth turns one mistake into a whole pot poured down the drain - the pass standard looks like it checks the schedule but actually checks training progress.

The 23:00-close-to-6:00-firing gap is the noodle shop's own compliance blind spot. Generic schedule checks look at weekly hours and consecutive days; those two shifts each pass, and neither is a consecutive-day violation, yet stacking them on one person yields seven hours of rest. No scheduling software checks it by default - only someone who knows the shop has a 6 a.m. broth shift would - which is why it lives in the checklist with a fixed resolution order: re-staff the broth shift, never touch the closing shift, because closing finishes the day's business while the broth swap is a purely internal move.

The "single point of failure" item does not stop you from publishing - it forces the fact into print, weekly. A shop with one noodle cook produces a perfectly legal, perfectly publishable sheet whose collapse is one sick day away, and most owners discover this after the resignation. Moving the fact from "the boss half-knows it" to "it appears in black and white every Friday" is what finally gets the second cook's training onto a schedule - recurring visibility is the only pressure a checklist can apply.

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