Introduction to Coverage

Coverage is the answer to one question about every resource need on a show: is it secured? Five stagehands, two box trucks, an A1 for the load-in call. For each of them, coverage tells you whether someone has actually committed, whether you are waiting on an answer, whether a name is only penciled in, or whether nobody has started.

Why Coverage Matters

A production manager looking at a list of needs has to tell four very different situations apart. Nobody has started on this one. Someone put a name in, but nothing is agreed. A request is out and you are waiting to hear back. It is locked. On a spreadsheet those four rows look the same, so you chase work that is already done and miss work that is not.

The usual workaround is a status column someone updates by hand. It goes stale the moment a vendor confirms by email or a freelancer drops out, and nobody remembers to change it. Coverage avoids that by never being typed in. It is worked out every time you look, from the reservations on each need: the people and units assigned to fill it and how far each of them has got. Confirm a crew member and the need moves; release one and it moves back.

How Coverage Works

A reservation is one person or unit filling a slot on a need, or a held quantity when the units are not named yet. Each reservation has a status, and the status decides which of four rungs its units sit on:

• Secured: confirmed, checked in, or completed.
• Awaiting: someone has been asked and owes an answer.
• Tentative: assigned, but not confirmed. This is a soft hold that tells everyone the slot is being worked.
• Open: units nobody has been assigned to yet.

Every unit of a need sits on exactly one rung. A no-show nobody replaced and a released reservation sit on none: their capacity is gone, so those units count as open again.

flowchart LR
    T["Tentative"] --> A["Awaiting"]
    T --> S["Secured"]
    A --> S
    T --> X(["Released or No-show"])
    A --> X
    S --> X
    X -.->|"units return to"| O["Open"]

The need's coverage badge then names the job left to do, which is not always the lowest rung:

Tentative outranks Awaiting on purpose. Finding somebody is a bigger job than chasing somebody, so a need with four people asked and one slot still empty reads Tentative, not Awaiting confirmation. The badge points you at the empty slot first.

Vendor Orders Count the Same as Your Own People

Coverage does not care whether a unit comes from your own crew or from a vendor. When a need is on an external order, the order holds its units as reservations, and the order's status sets their rung: a Draft order's units are tentative, Sent, Quoted and Awarded read as awaiting, Confirmed and Paid count as secured, and Abandoned or Canceled releases them. Ten stagehands on a confirmed vendor order are ten secured units, exactly like ten of your own people who confirmed. That is why the same number means the same thing on the event's Coverage page and on the organization's.

Internal orders are different: they say you intend to fill the need from your own pool, so their units count only once you assign people to them.

Coverage and Change Are Separate

A rigger who confirmed a 2pm call is still secured after the call moves to 5pm. Coverage stays green, because the commitment exists. What has changed is that the rigger has not been told. BackOps tracks that on its own Change axis, which flags the need as Needs review until someone marks the change as communicated. Keeping the two apart means a schedule change never hides a real commitment, and a commitment never hides a change nobody passed on.