Cross-training Coverage Planner

The problem this kills

There is one person who knows how to run the month-end close, or reset the line, or process the special-handling orders. Everyone knows who they are. And the day they call in sick - or hand in their notice - you find out the hard way that nobody else can do it.

Your skills matrix probably already knows this. It's sitting in a spreadsheet, color-coded, and nobody has the time to stare at it and ask the scary question: which of these skills has a backup of exactly zero? By the time a "bus factor of one" becomes a real absence, it's already an emergency.

This tool reads your matrix and does the staring for you. It surfaces the single points of failure, weights them by how critical the work is, factors in who's about to be on leave, and then helps you actually fix it - by drafting a cross-training plan you can approve and track.

What you'll build

A small, secure web app - just for your team - that:

• Imports your skills matrix, your critical-skills list with minimum-coverage targets, and your roster (including known upcoming leave).
• Computes coverage for every skill and flags the dangerous ones: skills only one person can do, critical tasks with thin backup, and skills whose only qualified people are about to be on leave.
• Ranks the risk so you fix single-person critical skills first, not the low-stakes stuff.
• Drafts cross-training assignments - who should learn what, from whom, and by when - aimed at closing the worst gaps.
• Puts a human approval gate in front of everything: you review the findings and approve each assignment before it's committed and dispatched.
• Tracks each assignment to "can-do," not just "assigned" - so a plan only counts as coverage once the learner can actually do the task.
• Exports a coverage + plan CSV in the columns your system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code) - it writes the actual code, you steer.
• It opens by interviewing you about your business - your current process, your matrix layout and skill-level scale, your critical tasks and coverage targets, your shift/leave patterns, and your messy exceptions - then tailors the data model, the risk scoring, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; it adapts to how you actually run.
• The exact data model for skills, people, ratings, targets, leave, and assignments - with dedupe guards built in.
• The risk-scoring logic (criticality x thinness of coverage x upcoming-leave exposure), explained in plain language so you can tune it.
• Ready-to-copy prompts for each build step, so you never have to know what to type.
• A "No API yet?" fallback: import from a Google Sheet / CSV and export a clean CSV - so you can build and use this today, with no integration to your existing system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own people and skills.
• A complete audit trail - who computed which findings, who approved which assignment, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the AI drafts the cross-training plan; a manager reviews and approves; only then is it committed and dispatched.
• Duplicate guards so the same skill isn't double-counted and the same learner-skill assignment can't be created twice.

Who it's for

Operations, shift, and team managers who get blindsided when the one person who knows a task is out - and who want to turn a static, color-coded skills matrix into an actual plan that removes the risk before it bites.

You've got this

You don't need to be a developer. You need your skills matrix and a free weekend. Paste the first prompt, answer a few questions about how your team works, and build the tool that makes "what if they quit?" a solved problem. You've got this - paste the first prompt.