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Holiday planning software - how to organize your holiday quickly and easily

Redaktion
06.01.2021 | 6 min reading time

Hybrides Projektmanagement

Agiles Projektmanagement

How to keep track of your employees' holidays easily and safely with the holiday planning software. 

Holiday planning is usually the biggest challenge for companies in view of the number of person days planned. It has an impact on all departments and projects. Particularly when employees work or are scheduled to work on several projects at the same time, holiday days often influence the success of the project. Because if annual leave planning is not integrated into the company's resource management, portfolio planning, project selection and the decision as to when which project can be implemented become a game of vabanque. Projects lie idle due to holidays and promised deadlines go awry. A modern software holiday planning solves these challenges.

 

The main advantages of the Can Do holiday planner software

Can Do is a project management software specialized in holistic resource management and has extended its solution with an application for professional holiday planning.

Processing of holiday applications at the push of a button with the holiday planning software

By integrating holidays into company-wide capacity planning, Can Do offers you holiday planner software that allows you to request, approve or reject holidays at the click of a mouse.

Integration of holiday-related absences into capacity planning with the holiday planning software

With the holiday planning software you can integrate holiday-related absences into capacity planning. The integrated holiday planning gives you a transparent insight into the availability of your employees and compares the requested holidays with the time requirements of the respective projects. Unpleasant surprises in the planning are thus a thing of the past.

Clear overview of holiday entitlements not yet applied for with the holiday planning software

As a supervisor, you always have an overview of the taken, applied for and remaining days of leave in your area of responsibility and can plan advantageously. Risks in projects and departments which could arise from the requested holiday are shown to you by the software holiday planning in real time.

Automatic updating of holiday accounts with the software holiday planning

All employees' holiday accounts are managed digitally and updated automatically on an ongoing basis.

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Plan your holiday with the software from Can Do

The project management tool with the holiday planner functions of Can Do provides your employees with a "My holiday calendar" tile and a "Request holiday" tile. As a supervisor, you will also receive the "Approve holiday" tile, a holiday calendar and an overview of "Annual planning". The configuration of the Can Do holiday planner is done in the administration area.

Applying for holidays with the holiday planning software

With just a few clicks, your employee can apply for their holiday online. He can see clearly how much holiday is still available, how many days are needed for the desired period - holidays and weekends are taken into account - and how many days of holiday are left after the application.

The types of holiday customary in the company (e.g. recreational leave, special leave, educational leave, etc.) are fully taken into account. At the same time, he can check whether his desired leave will cause conflicts in other plans. At the click of a mouse, he can view and analyze these with the software holiday planner.

A prerequisite for this is that these plans have been stored in the Can Do solution. In his "holiday calendar", the employee's holidays are highlighted in color.

Approve holidays with the holiday planning software

You can view the requests of your employees in the tile "Approve holidays" which belongs to the software holiday planning.

Here you can see the period of the requested holiday, the number of days required for it and the remaining holiday for the year.

You can also see whether the requested holiday causes overloads in the company-wide capacity planning.

The holiday calendar also gives you an overview of all the holidays taken, approved and applied for by your employees. The approved days are automatically deducted from the holiday account.

Annual planning with the holiday planning software

In the holiday planner software App Jahresplanung the holidays of the individual members of your department are stored - both the requested and the approved, the already taken and the remaining holidays.

This gives you an overview of when holidays are due in your department, who has holidays and when, and how many remaining days of holiday per person and for the whole department still need to be taken into account in the capacity analysis. 

Holiday calendar with the holiday planning software

A comprehensive public holiday calendar shows you not only the public holidays stored for a location, but also school holidays and other closing and absence days relevant to the company, which can be supplemented on a customer-specific basis.

 

Tips for holiday planning with a holiday planner software

  • Let the line activities be included in your
              capacity calculation. The more further "capacity
              reductions" - such as further training measures
              or special holidays - you plan in, the more
              accurately the capacity utilization can be
              analyzed and forecast.
  • Holidays are usually approved by the department
              or division manager, not the project manager.
              Therefore, your line and project managers must
              exchange information on the basis of a uniform
              data situation in order to be able to agree on an
              optimal schedule and time planning.
  • Start planning your holiday early. Even if the
              exact dates when who will be taking their
              holidays are not yet known, you should consider
              the capacity of the holiday for long-term planning
              (e.g. annual planning). As soon as you approve
              the holiday, it will be deducted from the quota.
  • You have to take holiday planning into account at
              the project portfolio level. As holidays tie up
              around 13% of capacity, otherwise the
              organization will take over. Also remember that
              holidays are not evenly distributed over the
              whole year.
  • From the past, patterns can be seen when and
              how much holiday was taken. So it should not
              surprise you that more holidays are taken during
              school holidays, for example.
  • Take into account holidays and the bridge days,
              which are gladly taken. In your project calendar
              and in the workload analysis all public holidays
              should be included.
  • In the case of large-scale projects, agree with the
              project staff on a kind of project break, during 
              which holidays can and should be taken if
              possible.
  • Establish a real representative system in which
              the representatives are trained and are always
              up to date on the current project status.

 

Organize small holidays correctly with the holiday planning software

Many projects come to a standstill, especially in summer, because the project staff are on holiday. The individual's holiday is only part of the problem. Also the constant coming and going in the project team and an agile project management  - as well as hybrid project management and multi-project management - combined with handovers and unfinished tasks brings projects to an additional halt: The projects take longer than planned, they become more complex and therefore more expensive.

It is not uncommon for entire projects to stand still or fail for several weeks because a single expert, a key resource, is on holiday. It is estimated that poor holiday planning due to lack of holiday planning software is responsible for up to 40 percent of all resource problems in projects.

Company holidays or holiday-related plant closures, which make holiday planning much easier, have become less common. Holiday is an individual concern of the employee, it is often requested quite spontaneously and preferably taken by the day.

As a rule, leave must be approved, unless there are urgent operational matters that speak against taking a holiday. An integrated holiday planning, in which the interplay of holiday, project work and line activities is fully taken into account, immediately shows you all overloads and problems that would result from the holidays. This creates transparency and enables mutual consideration.

 

Self organization and capacity comparison with the software holiday planning

If a company manages to plan the professional work in the departments, the project activities and the holidays holistically with a holiday planner software, a first big step has been taken.

However, the devil is in the detail - in this case in the calculation of possible overloads. A linear distribution of the individual workloads does not go far enough: planning which, like a kind of timetable, regulates exactly what the employee has to do and when, is no longer up-to-date. Instead, employees want to organize themselves more and more, i.e. work in an agile way. In addition, the amount of time they need to complete a task is often not known exactly. This interplay of self-organization and the inaccuracy of effort estimation requires a dynamic procedure for calculating the workload. A linear view definitely falls short here

A linear distribution of holidays in annual planning at portfolio level is becoming fatal: if the holidays-related absences are simply distributed linearly along the time axis, planning in the portfolio is ultimately doomed to failure - especially during school holidays, significantly fewer employees will be available than a linear capacity distribution would calculate. On the other hand, one or two employees will not be fully utilized outside such holidays and holiday periods. The consequences are project delays and additional costs.

The holiday is usually not known in detail for the following year. This is the most common reason why holidays are often completely neglected in planning. Often the number of available working days is simply reduced across the board. Seen in terms of the year this is true, but in the projects it is not true. The annual holiday is known according to the employment contract and can be planned for the year. With agile methods you can take the holiday into account in the portfolio planning thanks to a software holiday planning.