Holiday calendars in Jira serve as a vital tool for project managers and teams. They help ensure that project planning considers holidays, team members leave, and other non-working days. By creating a Jira Holiday Calendar, you can maintain project timelines, allocate resources efficiently, and minimize potential disruptions caused by team members' absence.

This article offers practical insights into Jira Leave Management, specifically focusing on how to effectively handle your team's vacation and holiday schedules within Jira timelines. The utilization of the ActivityTimeline add-on for Jira simplifies the process of tracking your team members' availability for new assignments, identifying open slots for fresh projects, and recognizing periods when they will be absent from the office for extended durations.

How to Manage Vacation Days and Holidays in Jira?

Jira, by default, doesn't have built-in features specifically designed for tracking holidays, vacations, sick leaves, or other types of non-working days. However, you can use some workarounds or third-party apps to achieve this.

Resource Management with ActivityTimeline

ActivityTimeline is a resource planning and tracking tool for Jira, that helps to manage teams, projects, and tasks in the same place. It provides a comprehensive Planning Dashboard that contains user and team timelines. You can schedule Jira issues or create new tasks directly from these timelines and always understand who is doing what and when it will be done with ease:

Track Team Members' Vacations

What is more important, this app offers a special feature named - Leave Management. Leave Management involves overseeing and maintaining a record of employees' leave-related information within the organization's Jira vacation calendar. Managing employee leave process manually can be quite time-consuming, requiring the manual tracking of leave requests, approvals, and related data. Additionally, the data may need to be manually entered into a system for tracking and reporting purposes.

By adopting an automated Leave Management solution, you can significantly streamline the process and reduce the time invested in it. Jira lacks this feature, but there are tools, like ActivityTimeline that can help with this problem.

Manage Sick Leave and Vacation Requests

How can ActivityTimeline help you with leave management? Here are some key points:

1. Monitor Employee Absences: ActivityTimeline offers a comprehensive solution for overseeing employee vacations and tracking their availability. This tool provides real-time insights into when your team members will be present at work and when they will be on leave.
2. Manage Full or Partial Day-Offs with Ease: Effortlessly create custom full-day or partial-day leave requests by simply clicking on the calendar within ActivityTimeline.
3. Public Holiday Integration: ActivityTimeline allows you to establish a public holiday calendar that can be seamlessly integrated into your team's schedule. Furthermore, you have the option to add events, such as sick leaves or holidays, for all team members at once and configure recurring events for repetitive activities.
4. Leave Reports: The app also offers Leave Reports that help a vacation Manager track public holidays, vacation requests, leave requests, and vacation days.

The app provides internal events to track and manage non-working days. There are default ones such as holidays, vacations, sick leaves, and days off:

You can easily manage vacations or sick leave on the timelines and see when the team member will not be available for work:

Each user has a special workload indicator, which shows the number of working hours per day. When you create a vacation or other type of event, the indicator will be updated, to show non-working hours:

Users can create a holiday or any other event for the entire team with a few clicks:

There are also other interesting custom event options like:

1. Bookings - This event type blocks persons' capacity for a certain number of hours per day. Allows to allocate a person for a certain activity, without specifying exact Jira tasks.
2. Placeholders - Can exist either as a standalone item or be connected to the Jira issue. Can be used to try different planning scenarios without actually changing Jira issues. Approving the Placeholder creates an actual Jira task.

3. Over time - Opposite to Booking, this event adds a certain number of hours to the user’s capacity on a certain day.
4. Note - The item does not affect the user’s capacity and is a simple text message/reminder on a person’s timeline.

Users can even create their events within the app, which is very useful, as very often companies have different activities connected with the work process, and these activities are not available in Jira (like business trips, meetings, team buildings, etc.):

Create Holiday Schemes

With the globalization of organizations and the collaboration of teams across various time zones, it becomes increasingly vital to consider public holidays and non-working days when planning schedules and estimating work. Managing holidays and non-working days within major project management tools like Jira can often be a challenging task. This is where the Jira Holiday Scheme steps in to provide a solution.

Just create a holiday scheme once, apply it to teams and holidays will appear on the user timelines accordingly. The Managers will need to create these holidays manually no more, they will just use this scheme:

You are welcome to check out our video explaining the process of Holiday Schemes creation for better understanding:  

Conclusion

In conclusion, Jira vacation calendar is an indispensable tool for effective project planning and resource management. By integrating the right tool and following the simple steps outlined in this guide, you can seamlessly integrate holidays and leave into your project schedules, ensuring that your projects stay on track even when team members are away. This proactive approach not only minimizes disruptions but also enhances your project management capabilities, contributing to the successful and timely delivery of your projects.