Vacations Planning

[Jacques Guertin]

Hi all,

Informative stuff here.

Now, let's say that I want to consider resources vacations. What is the
best way around? I though of creating tasks that cannot be leveled, but the
resource pool would wrongly show the same availability as if without
vacations for that period. Example: resource A is off for the next two
weeks. So I create a task assigned to that resource. Problem: I work with
resource pools, i.e. 300%, 400%, etc. availability. So in the resource
histogram, it would still show 400% availability, but with a resource usage
of, say, 300% instead of 200% during that period of time.

Thanks in advance for your clever answers and suggestions.

Jacques G.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Jacques,

It depends.
I have a customer who wants his project leaders to show vacations as "Do Not
Level" tasks, and personally I prefer that too.

My customer's reasons are:

- You can see vacation in any Gantt Chart
- When you consolidate all projets, if the project leaders have done their
work properly, the person will be 100% loaded across the board, and if he is
not, that means he is available for an other project which is easy for
management's decision making

But of course leveling is mandatory!

My personal preference comes from the weakness of using a calendar: when you
assign two people to a task, and one takes a day off, Project will
INEVITABLY schedule the other one to work alone; whereas often, working
together is required.
On the other hand, when yoiu put vacations as tasks, and you use leveling,
you can cross out the option "Level Individual Assignments", at least for
those task where collaboration is required.

Conclusion: using personal calendars for vacation is nice, you do not need
leveling, but you are in the blind and you cannot make people work together.

HTH





--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

 

[Steve House]

Just another point of view here - I'm of the opinion that the task list in a
project describes the work activities that are required to creat the final
project deliverable. It is of very limited and specific scope and does not
deal with the activities of the business enterprise as a whole. Vacations
are, by definition, non-work - the person goes somewhere so s/he can veg out
and not work. As such, then, they are not part of the project and in terms
of the project plan simply represent time that is not available for project
work. WHY the resource is unavailable and whether they're paid for the down
time or not is irrelevant to the project - the only thing that matters in
computing the project specific schedule and budget is when the work will
proceed and what the cost of the resource doing will be. The time and cost
of the resource when they're not working on project tasks, whether it's
because they're on vacation or simply doing something else in the office not
project related or even tied up working on a different project, is not of
issue to managing this specific project plan of interest.

If you need a graphic of vacations to show why tasks are proceeding at a
certain rate during a time frame of interest, either create another project
plan that just shows vacations or even better, a pseudo Gantt chart in a
tool like Visio to show the vacations as bars on a calendar.