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Dear all,
I have a question regarding practical approach to absence management. Under absence I mean things like vacations and public holidays.
In 2 products, familiar to me (Microsoft Project and Spider) this is meant to be done via calendar exceptions with small difference in how it is implemented.
But somehow I still feel, that managing absence by assigning a resource to a high priority (unmovable) task with the proper name (e.g. Resource A vacation, Christmas, etc ) has a lot of advantages over management with Calendar exceptions:
In another words I see a lot of advantages and practically very little disadvantages in this.
So, my question to those, who do scheduling as their main job:
How do you do the absence management in practice?
Regards.
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Dieter,
thank you for your feedback.
Stephen,
RE "how do you stop that bucket from being summed""
See how it can be done in MS Project:
In Gantt Chart view it is straightforward. In resource Usage View it is not that straightforward, but still possible by groupping on user-defined fields. See example below.
In the same example usage of splitable and not-splitable task
Hi Evgeny
In general you have different kinds of absences:
- Permitted planned with a higher priority than all other activities: e.g. allowed holidays, scheduled treatments in a hospital
- Planned, not yeat permitted with a lower proirity than project activities: e.g. holidays, trainings
- Not planned absences: e.g. sickness greater than a fixed duration
Local regulations on data privacy must be regarded, in many countries it must be agreed with the workers' council. Be careful!
@ Evgeny, Stephen
Any planning software which is able to calculate links between projects/schedules will regard and calculate all open projects as one graph/network. Some will be able to calculate specific critical paths - depending on parameter settings.
Good and successful planning
Dieter
Hi, Evgeny.
Yes, that might work. But the trouble with putting absence time in a subproject is that then if you're using the software (somehow!) to compute drag, I don't think it would recognize it as drag within the project schedule. And that would remove what I see as a big advantage to treating absences as an activity assignment, i.e., easily computing resource availability drag.
Drag is project-critical-path specific, so it needs to be within the project schedule. I think? (This may all be a bit above my pay grade.)
Fraternally in project management,
Steve the Bajan
Stephen,
RE "how do you stop that bucket from being summed"
Well, there are possibly various ways to do it. E.g. in MS Project I would just create a separate WBS for "absence task", which would have the same level as the real project, or I would place vacation tasks in a separate subproject (which is pretty much the same).
In general, if the software has possibility to separate costs of different types of activities, it shall be able to separate absence activities as well. And I am pretty much sure, that most of the tools can do it.
My approach also makes it easy to manage programs or portfolios.
You just create only one subproject with "absence tasks" and then add it in a portfolio, just like any other project.
Regards.
Evgeny
Evgeny, I had never thought of your suggestion and my initial reaction was: "That's great! It will allow direct calculation of resource availability drag (RAD) with the project!" (This is a very important metric for organizations that suffer year after year from understaffing in the same critical skills -- yet no one is gathering this information.)
However, as I think about it, it's a bit complex.
Paid vacation doesn't come out of the project budget. If you assign a resource to an "unavailable" bucket within a project schedule, how do you stop that bucket from being summed, in terms of resource usage, cost, and even value if you are using a value breakdown structure?
I believe Vladimir once told me that Spider allows the user to decide whether each WBS component should be summed or not (a feature which is important for a VBS). But with most software packages, I don't think that's possible.
However, what you suggest is clearly doable with a couple of little tweaks to the software code. And easily computing the critical path drag and drag cost of resource unavailability just like with an activity would be a definite benefit.
Fraternally in project management,
Steve the Bajan
Stephen, Dieter,
thank you very much for your feedback!
Do I get get it correctly, that somehow managing absence as a task seems to be a good idea, yet major software manufactures implicitly impose the calendar method?
I am just really wondering how it is done by a professional planners? I must say I do not have an exposure to people, who know or use Microsoft Project more than I do, not to mention other scheduling tools (it is just not that needed in our business), but the person from whom I learned MSP always did it by using tasks (he wasn't a professional planner however, he was an engineer).
That is why I am looking at the wider professional audience to get a feedback on how it is done in practice.
Regards.
Evgeny, I like this! I completely agree except for one caveat: I'm not sure what priority to give to a vacation/holiday assignment. I'd want it to be clear that this assignment can probably be changed at less cost than if the employee is working on the critical path of an even more time-costly project.
Categorizing such assignments as "tasks" should then allow their drag and drag costs to be computed. And if the drag cost of a vacation is large, the organization should find a way to "buy back" the time, negotiating a deal with the employee to give them the time (or more!) off when s/he is not on the critical path. One day on the critical path can easily be worth more than 20 days off it.
Fraternally in project management,
Steve the Bajan
Hi Evgeny
I agree to your idea and did it already in the past.
If you use the calendar for absence planning, there is suddenly a miraculous prolongation of a task which doesn't raise schedule's credibility. Absence task are more obvious, but workers' regulations as i.e. data security laws must be regarded - task "absence" not "sickness at ...". All reports must obey to these regulations.
If you use resource levelling in Primavera you can assign the highest level to these tasks if it is a confirmed absence, a low level if not yet confirmed. Primavera P6 has a weakness as it doesn't interrup planned tasks; it waits with a lower level task after the holidays.
Good planning!
Dieter
Email: PPadmin@planningplanet.com
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