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:
- It makes it very visible on Gantt diagram on why resource is not working on a task (e.g. because he is assigned to a task “Vacation”)
- It makes it easy to give to a resources "who is doing what and when" report, where a resource would clearly see when he is working on a task, when he is off and when he does not have any work assigned to him yet.
- It makes it very easy to see, which resources are assigned to each of the exceptions (e.g. one can see, which resources are assigned to a task “Christmas” or “Chinese New Year” )
- It makes is very easy to create an absence report for each of the resources (e.g. vacations and Public Holidays, trainings)
- Often one needs to have a cost of absence (e.g. when resource costs company a fixed amount of money per hour) In this case by creating a task for absence solves such problem very easy.
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.