Vacation Schedules on Large Projects How do you handle them - Best

[Michael Balda]

Vacation Schedules on Large Projects How do you handle them - is there a Best
Practice I can follow from your experiences?

Anyone able to offer some advice? I have a project with 80 team members.
How do you hanldle scheduling vacations/time-off when planning/using MS Proj
2003. I know you can enter everyones vacation as it arises easily in Project
but with 80 people I am wondering how you have accounted for it - or how you
made it an easy process so that vacation does not ruin the schedule, with 80
people, that equates to a ton of time off for people over a year long project.

Look forward to your comments.

 

[WD]

Are you using enterprise PM? EPM is essentially project server and the other
components. If you are, then you can use the administrative project to handle
what you have described.

If you aren't using EPM then the only way that I can think of doing it
besides dealing with Resource Calendars is to track that offline using Excel.
If you are going to track it using Resource Calendars then you or the
resources would mark their vacation days as non-working time. Doing this
would impact your schedule as the tasks are schedule at the intersection of
the task calendars and the resource calendars with the resource calendar
driving the task schedule.

HTH

 

[Michael Balda]

We are not using server - they have ordered it along with SQL, so maybe in
the future it will be running for us but that will be to late as I need to
find something to manage now.

I do not want to manage it in excel as I want Proj to adjust dates to tasks
when people have vacation. WIth 80 people and 3 weeks vacation min. for
everyone, forgetting about all that time off would be a mistake.

Have any other thoughts? Maybe someone else will have some ideas for me?