From Prototype to Production: Why Embedded Teams Need Better Shift Planning Than Spreadsheets
Embedded work is a special kind of pressure. You are not just writing code. You are dealing with real hardware, real deadlines, and real constraints that do not care about your calendar. A board shows up late. A component gets swapped. A firmware build passes in the lab and fails on the line. A customer reports a bug that only happens after 17 hours of uptime. When that happens, the difference between a calm team and a chaotic team is often simple: who is on duty, who is available, and how fast you can coordinate the next steps. Many small and mid-size engineering groups still run schedules in spreadsheets. It feels fine at the beginning because everyone knows each other, and the team is used to improvising. But once you have multiple time zones, multiple projects, and multiple responsibilities like on-call rotation, lab access, QA benches, production support, and customer escalations, a spreadsheet becomes a quiet risk. Not because spreadsheets are bad, but because the work is too dynamic for static files.
