When creating a timeline do take into account team member vacations in the beginning. It’ll likely depend on the size and nature of your project, but you should always take vacation schedules and availability into account sooner rather than later. For large business critical projects, it’s extremely useful to have this information up front in the planning process where the timeline and guidelines for requesting time off can be clearly defined. Vacation plans of all the team members should be considered as risks and the respective mitigation as well as contingency should be in place.
If you are planning any contingency period in your schedule, it will leave the contingency period for truly unexpected events or delays than using it to make up for vacations. Even if exact vacation schedule is not known for team members, you should try to have a placeholder for vacation time in the schedule since it is very much reality that people will take the vacation time that company allows them. Since we know that not all team members take vacation at the same time, the project plan should be adjusted in real time when people go on vacations such that they are not on critical path during the period they are out.
How do you schedule? Do you estimate effort (work) required to complete a task, then schedule the duration available for that task, and keep them disconnected? Or do you make your durations linked to the amount of resource you have, so if you add (or lose) resources, then duration of the planned task changes. How do you estimate? Do you use 3-point method? (Optimistic, Pessimistic and likely figures to calculate an estimate?). If you do not have alternative resources, there will be an increase in durations due to the lack of key resources. Risk management is also a factor – if you identify a risk (that key resources will be unavailable to complete tasks within scheduled times) then you can plan mitigation actions – get more resources on board, allow a delay, re-schedule activities for when the resource is available.Always include everything you know about dependencies, constraints (including resource availability) and risks into your timeline at the earliest opportunity, for best chances of success.
You need to calculate all the vacations to reduce the risks on:
- Resource adjustment: if the team member assigned with tasks on critical path, you don’t want your project slip on that.
- Budget: without the vacation information, you can’t have a more accurate calculation on budget.
- Communication: if you know which resource will take vacation by when, you can align the expectation from other stakeholders, to avoid any surprises.
- Risk management
What will really help you out is using project management software. These type of programs like MS Project have ways of putting resources in with days off, schedules of hours, and vacation/holiday times and you can always change it. When you assign your resources to your activities you can look at histograms that are produced to help you allocate your resources and adjust the schedule if your resource is over allocated.
Always create unconstrained project schedule first, taking work process dependencies into consideration. Then apply role based dependencies, planned outage, utilization rates or structural lost time. Lastly apply resource level dependency. It addresses how obstacles like this can impact the critical path, taking into account trade-offs between time and cost, in a probabilistic analysis. Now this is where you start figuring your resources, you estimate your resources such as time they are working, and you figure in their days off, vacation, etc. Look at resource calendars, costs, time, and estimate the duration of the activities using various estimating techniques. Then you develop your schedule.
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