Rolling out new software in an FMG in 30 days.

Why thirty days and not three months

An FMG schedule is not judged when it is built, it is judged in the weeks after it goes out. That is when a physician cancels, when the hospital list lands, when the walk-in block ends up with nobody on it. Six of the eight moments where an FMG schedule breaks happen after publication rather than during the build. A trial that stops at the finished grid has evaluated the easy half.

Hence the length. Thirty days is what it takes to build a period, publish it, absorb what happens to it and look at the numbers. There is nothing magic about the number, it just happens that an FMG period runs roughly that long, and so does the free first month most vendors offer.

A three-month rollout, in practice, means three months of double entry. The spreadsheet stays the reference because nobody dares cut it off, the team checks both, and the evaluation ends up covering a tool nobody really used. The deadline is there to force a genuine cutover.

What to settle before day 1

Four questions get answered before the software is even opened. None takes more than an hour, and each one is expensive if left for later.

1. Who decides at day 30, and on what criteria. Write the name and the numbers down in advance. A decision made after the fact gets made on impressions, and impressions always favour the tool people already know.
2. Who the second person is. In an FMG the risk rarely sits in the software and almost always in the fact that one person alone knows how to work it. If part of your reason for changing is that the manager cannot take two weeks off, do not rebuild that situation in the new tool starting at configuration.
3. Which period you pick. Take one with a statutory holiday, vacation to cover and at least one likely withdrawal. Avoid the two holiday periods, 22 to 28 December and 29 December to 4 January, where the FMG still has to offer a minimum of 44 hours of services over six days and the schedule changes shape. Avoid the month around your annual service-offer review as well, since the offer is locked for twelve months and no mid-year change is permitted.
4. The privacy impact assessment. Scheduling software holds no patient chart, but availabilities, absences and the reasons behind a withdrawal remain personal information. Section 17 of the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector requires that assessment and a written agreement before any communication of personal information outside Quebec. It belongs in week 1, not at day 28 when the team is already committed.

The four weeks

Week 1. Configure, do not campaign

Setting up a specialized tool is quick when its objects are the ones the clinic already names every day. With Synchro, a 30-user team is configured in about 45 minutes, with our help. That lead time varies a great deal between products and the question is worth asking in a demo: some require a minimum of eight hours of training over four video sessions before the first schedule, some charge implementation fees set case by case, others assume a project team and an institutional procurement process. Our comparisons lay out those gaps product by product.

The real work of week 1 is elsewhere. It consists of gathering what your spreadsheet never says: the actual list of offices and which ones are permanently assigned, the on-call tiers and what an evening is worth against a weekend, the tacit arrangements nobody ever wrote down because everyone knows them. That material lives in the manager's head and in eight months of email. Getting it out takes longer than ticking boxes in an interface.

Invite the team at the end of the week rather than at the start, once the structure exists. A physician who opens an empty tool and is asked to figure it out disengages; a physician who opens a schedule he recognizes writes his constraints in two minutes. With Synchro each person writes them in plain language from their own profile and then confirms what the system understood, which spares the manager from translating thirty sets of personal rules.

What week 1 should not be is a team meeting to sell the project. The convincing demonstration is next month's schedule, and it does not exist yet.

Week 2. Rebuild a period you have already published

Take a period the FMG has already lived through and rebuild it in the new tool, in parallel. The exercise is worth doing because you already know the right answer, along with the compromises you accepted to get there.

Write down what the tool refuses, particularly the double office assignments a spreadsheet accepts without blinking and that normally surface on Monday morning in the hallway. Write down the placements you would not have thought of, since an assignment engine does not get tired and has no habits. The rest of the exercise is about what the tool does not know yet, and that is the part that pays.

Missing constraints are the real deliverable of week 2. Every time the result makes you say "no, that does not work, because", you have just caught a rule the FMG has applied for years without writing it down. Note it on the spot. It is the same inventory as the 27 real constraints in an FMG schedule, done on your own grid.

Cut nothing this week. The old system stays the reference, the team changes no habits, and the new tool works alongside without anyone depending on it.

Week 3. Publish for real

This is the week a rollout either lands or stalls. Publish the following period in the new tool, and only there. Take the old file out of circulation the same day: archive it, rename it, make it read-only. Two schedules published at once leave an FMG where nobody knows which one governs, and the team goes back to the first one it finds, which is always the familiar one.

Say out loud where the schedule now lives, and write it where the team actually looks, reception included. Administrative staff live inside the schedule as much as the physicians do, and a secretary who missed the message rebuilds a third parallel system with her own printout.

Then stage a surprise rather than waiting for one. Cancel an on-call shift mid-week and follow the replacement all the way through: how long it took to find someone, how many people were notified, and above all whether the displayed schedule updated on its own. A round of phone calls takes thirty to forty minutes and leaves an official schedule that lies, whereas a shift offered to every eligible physician at once resolves while the manager does something else. That scene replays every week, so you may as well see it now.

Week 4. The day 30 test

Three numbers, measured in both systems, are enough to decide.

• The time it takes to build the period. Timed, not estimated.
• The number of back-and-forths with the team to fill in missing information.
• The number of corrections made after publication. The most revealing of the three, because that is where most of the management hours and most of the frustration hide.

In our pilot FMG in Saint-Hyacinthe, which has 19 physicians, 33 other professionals and 15 offices, a team of that size managed in a spreadsheet took about 30 management hours a month, corrections after publication included, and about one hour with the tool. Each physician went from more than 12 hours a year to roughly ten minutes to enter their schedule. Those are our own measurements rather than a network average, but they give you the order of magnitude to compare your own numbers against.

Add one question for the team, asked individually: do you know where your schedule is right now. A hesitant answer in week 4 is a more reliable signal than any satisfaction survey.

If the decision is no, get your data out while access is still open. A CSV export and an iCal export tell you whether you can leave cleanly, and that answer counts in the evaluation like everything else.

Four ways to waste the thirty days

The first is picking a quiet month. An FMG runs fine in July on just about anything, a shared spreadsheet included. Testing over a period with no statutory holiday, no vacation to cover and no withdrawal is like test-driving a car in a parking lot.

The second is letting the parallel run drag on. Past week 3, keeping two live systems no longer provides reassurance, it provides a way to avoid deciding. The cost is paid in trust: a team that has seen two contradictory schedules once will check both for six months.

The third is letting one person handle the configuration. The silo rebuilds itself in a week and becomes invisible, because everything works as long as that person is there.

The fourth is postponing the privacy question. A privacy impact assessment demanded at day 28 by someone on the board stops a project the team has already adopted, and that kind of reversal is exactly what makes the next change harder.

Where Synchro fits

Synchro builds schedules for medical teams in Quebec using the objects of the job: walk-in blocks, weighted on-call shifts, shared offices, constraints written in plain language by each person, transfers between colleagues with a record of who accepted and when. Across the thirty days described here, our part concentrates in week 1, where we configure the clinic with you, and in week 3, where a change becomes visible to the whole team the moment it is made. Pricing is published, $10 CAD per user per month billed annually or $15 CAD monthly, with the first month free, which covers exactly the window described above. There are no setup fees on top.

A few limits, for the sake of clarity. Synchro holds no patient data, does not replace your EMR, handles neither the AMP list nor the attendance rate, and does not run payroll. The company was founded in 2025 and the product matured in one pilot FMG, which means the numbers above are self-reported and cover a single team. If your organization has specific hosting requirements, our security and compliance page covers the technical side and is worth reading before day 1.

Further reading

• FMG schedule management: which tool to choose
• Why Excel is not enough for FMG scheduling
• Best scheduling software for a Quebec FMG: 7 tools compared
• FMG scheduling software: the complete guide
• Synchro pricing