Originally Posted by
White Van Driver
It might be a good idea here to just give potential joiners a quick rundown of our rostering system, JSS.
Each month the company lists all the trips for a full month. P777 its normally around 1500 or so trips to be shared among the 600ish copilots on the fleet. We then have a few days to put together our bids. This is currently happening now, for March rosters.
You can make up to 15 "bid groups".
In each bid group you have 7 buckets to fill with the trips, using a sequence of commands. Ultimately you can differentiate between the trips however you like... Mondays, report after 11.45am, Caribbean, BA283 on Wednesday, long layovers in Mauritius, anything you like right down to a certain flight number on a certain date.
The 7 buckets range from what JSS will try to give you lots of if it can, down to what it will try to avoid giving you, if it can. You can leave any trips you really dont want outside by not putting them in any bucket at all, and JSS won't even look at those trips for you.
But if it doesn't have enough work to build you a roster, that Bid Group will fail and it'll move onto the next Bid Group.
After it has made a roster for everyone, if it has too many leftover trips, JSS will open up rosters from the bottom up to squeeze more trips onto your month. It'll still try to give you what you've asked for but really all bets are off. This is called Global Constraints and has recently gone all the way to the top of the list causing much frustration.
On a practical level, i find as junior P777 i can't get any particular day off im after, but if i give it 20 destinations i like, it might give me one or two from that list. The rest will be from the lower buckets.
For March, I've tried to get a certain Wed/Thu off for childcare. Then I've tried to get the following weekend off. Then ive tried to avoid JKF EWR ORD. Then I've listed 23 places I like in the top 3 buckets (of approx 45 destinations on the fleet). I'll update here the result if anyone's interested.
Apologies if this post is seen as a bit off piste. But bidding and rostering is such a big part of life at BA I think it probably warrants a discussion...
Good breakdown of how JSS works. In addition I'd say that roster satisfaction is highly dependent on how picky you want to be, and the higher up the list the more picky you can be whilst still getting a decent roster.
I'm approx 70% on my seat on SH, and commute from a UK base, so my bids focus around grouping work together, avoiding day trips, and night stopping at home. Not bothered about weekends off, or specific destinations (other than home), so happy to take anything that meets the above criteria. Rosters are pretty good on the whole, and with some swapping you can get what you want.
If, as a new joiner, you want every Saturday/Sunday off, with all high credit day trips (i.e. fewer days at work), and want X night stop on Y date, then you may be disappointed, but if you're relaxed about what you get then the rosters aren't half bad. And the beauty of BA is every month you rise up the seniority a little bit more, so life will always get better.