Here at Websystems, we are starting to feel the summer groove coming on: we
are seeing more and more vacation automated replies to emails. More than that,
it seems the summer season puts people in a different mood: happier and
mellower. It makes our jobs that much nicer, which is always appreciated :-)
This reminded me of scheduling and summer vacations. In North America and Europe, most of us will take a few weeks of vacation time
in the summer. From a project scheduling perspective, this can have heavy
consequences on delivery times. With most of the team off work, things will not
get done as quickly as they would in the summer. When assigning tasks to your
team, it should be taken into account, especially with time-sensitive tasks.
One way to keep track of everyone's vacation would be
to create a project called "Vacation Dates" and let everyone create a
task for their vacations, with 8 hours of estimated time per day of vacation.
This way, the person would show up at completely booked on the workload report.
You could also print a Gantt chart of your team's vacation schedule, as a reminder.
What's your technique?
How do you keep track of vacation schedules and meake sure someone doesn't get scheduled to work during their vacation?