How do most people track vacation time?

[Bill Cole]

I know you can set up vacation time as an administrative task to keep track
of vacation time taken. But how do most of you incorporate this into your
schedule, so that schedule dates reflect in advance the amount of vacation
that is expected to be taken?

I know there are many ways you could do this, just wondering what methods
people have been using successfully.

You could figure the % of time a resource be on vacation for the duration of
the project and then adjust their development percentage accordingly.
(i.e. 4 week vacation per year = 7.6%. Create a vacation leg for the year
with the user plugged in at 7.6%. If support is 10% for that resource, then
for development activities they'd be plugged in at 82.4%).

OR

Explicitly put vacation legs into the schedule at known dates (if vacation
date known) or somewhat random periods if the amount of vacation time is
known but
the exact date is not known. This is what I have been doing in schedules
for years and it works out OK. So I would put four 1 week vacation leg
into the users
schedule during the course of the year. For the rest of time, their
development percent would be 90% (10% support).

Any comments or other ideas?

Bill

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Bill --

We recommend entering vacation on each resource's personal calendar in the
Enterprise Resource Pool, rather than using administrative projects for this
purpose. The advantage of the method we recommend is that it causes Project
Server to automatically reschedule tasks in all projects during the
nonworking time periods on each resources calendar. When using
administrative projects, the automatic rescheduling of tasks will not
happen.

Just a thought. Let's hear what others have to offer you from experience.

 

[Rob Stewart]

Dale,
This is MEAT, not theory.
Cudos!

Just like the book, BTW!
-RS

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Rob --

Thank you for the compliment, kind sir!

 

[Ron M]

Who would be entering the vacation time on the personal calendar's? The
administrator?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Ron M --

Someone with Project Server administrator permissons would need to do this.
Hope this helps.