What is the Best Way to Handle Holidays in Silverbucket?
Every organisation has their own internal guidelines on handling holidays within their company and Silverbucket is a fantastic tool to accompany these guidelines.
We have identified a few different holiday approaches in our Silverbucket customers:
1) Users with extensive user rights mark the holidays for everyone in the system into Silverbucket's absence project.
2) Anyone can resource themselves for an Absence project to showcase when they are about to have their holidays.
3) Anyone can soft book themselves for an Absence project as "holiday wishes" and supervisors accept these wishes separately.
Choosing the best approach really comes down to how you wish to handle holidays and how strict you wish your user rights to be - in the default setting, for example, basic users are not allowed to resource themselves for any project by default (not even absence projects!) which means that options #2 and #3 are out of question by default.
Every single one of these approaches depend upon having at least one holiday project in Silverbucket. The project can be marked as an Absence project when creating it, or afterwards from the Project's Dashboard if you wish.
1) Users with Extensive User Rights Allocate the Holidays for Everyone in Silverbucket
When using the default user rights only certain users can resource projects:
- Admins
- Full Rights
- Project manager for that specific project they are managers of
This is the strictest way of handling holidays and holiday wishes. Simultaneously it ensures that no holidays slip by accidentally and everyone stays posted about the current holiday situation.
If this is your desired way of handling things you can continue using Silverbucket as it is. However, if you wish to loosen the process a little we have a few options below that offer you a helping hand.
2) Anyone can Resource Themselves for an Absence Project
By default basic users aren't allowed to resource themselves for projects. This can be tweaked in two ways:
2A) Anyone in the system is granted rights to resource themselves for any project they are members of
This is an overall perfect approach for more casual, small to mid -sized environments. Configuring Silverbucket like this will allow every user to:
- See every project they are members of
- Resource themselves for any project they are members of
If you feel like this is a convenient approach for your company, please contact support@silverbucket.com and point out to this option.
2B) Anyone in the system is granted rights to resource themselves for absence projects
This is a secure way of letting your employees mark their holidays but also not accidentally mess up the resourcing plans created for other projects. This way the actual project resourcing can be kept within users that have extensive user rights in the system - but the holiday resourcing can be divided evenly for all the employees.
To allow self-resourcing for only certain projects, Silverbucket needs some sort of metadata / identifier that separates these projects from the rest of the projects. This will be the project type option called Absence.
With this approach anyone could resource themselves for any absence type project
If you think having a "Wild Wild West resourcing project" is the best approach for you to have throw us an email to support@silverbucket.com and we'll continue from there.
3) Anyone Can Tentatively Resource Themselves for an Absence Project and Supervisors Accept these Wishes Separately
With Silverbucket's Soft Booking & Resourcing Requests functionalities you can have a totally different flow for holiday wishes:
.1User rights are tweaked so that anyone in the system is allowed to tentatively resource themselves for all projects (option 3A) or just certain projects (option 3B)
.2Everyone marks their holiday wishes as tentative allocations for the holiday project
.3These tentative allocations are forwarded to acceptors by using the Resourcing Requests
.4Users with extensive rights accept or reject these wishes manually
While accepting the requests requires a bit of manual work from certain department in your company, this approach is especially useful for situations where not everyone can have their holidays as they wish - sometimes you have to make tough choices and decline someone's holiday request to ensure the workflow in an important project, for example.
By default basic users aren't allowed to create tentative allocations for themselves for projects so we have two options:
3A) Anyone in the system is granted rights to create tentative allocations for themselves for any project
This way the confirmed resource planning stays intact as basic users can only create tentative allocations for all projects. If you think this is the best approach for you, please contact support@silverbucket.com and point out to this option.
3B) Anyone in the system is granted rights to resources themselves for certain projects
Projects that can be tentatively resourced by anyone is based on the agreed upon metadata, such as the absence project type - just like in section 2B which is explained above.
If you think this would work wonders in your company hook us up at