Vacation management in Jira. Explore the possibilities of Vacation Manager

A vacation management program that is easy to use, affordable and enables the finalisation of the entire process without the need to print anything is what many entrepreneurs dream about. If your company uses Jira, implementing the vacation management functionalities will be fairly easy – all you need is the Vacation Manager for Jira add-on.

Companies that do not use Atlassian solutions (yet) are encouraged to read this article as well. We continuously recommend the Atlassian ecosystem for business process handling (Jira Software, Jira Core), customer service (Jira Service Management), and as an intranet/extranet solution (Confluence and the Linchpin + Confluence combination). We are capable of creating a coherent work environment, which may be further developed by means of special applications or the custom development service (functionalities on demand).

Vacation Manager – vacation management program

Our specialists have already developed a series of add-ons that offer useful and practical solutions implemented in the Jira and Confluence environments. Vacation Manager for Jira is one of them, gaining more and more popularity with the increasing interest in transferring business processes into IT systems.

Thanks to this tool we are able to offer our clients a tried and tested solution for vacation management in the company.

The application enables i.a.:

• Creating vacation requests and submitting them for the supervisor’s approval;
• Reporting days and hours off with 30-minute accuracy;
• Appointing a replacement for the time of absence;
• Approving / rejecting / requesting more information about the request or cancelling previously approved request (supervisor’s menu);
• Accessing vacation statistics – users can see the number of used and unused vacation days, supervisors also have access to the statistics of their teams and the HR team has access to the extended statistics of all users (with a cross-section overview option, e.g. by vacation type);
• Displaying an additional notification of a given user’s absence directly in the Jira system;
• Flexible calendar configuration – every user may have his or her own days off calendar and defined working time (the default is 8 hours per day).

Thanks to Vacation Manager every stage of the vacation management process is completed in Jira. Using a tool integrated with Jira means avoiding costs of implementing and handling an external system. The HR team does not need to worry about handling and entering paper requests into the system as the employees submit vacation requests themselves and the supervisors may approve or reject them immediately. For employees that work with Jira on a daily basis, using Vacation Manager is as simple and intuitive as creating an ordinary task in any other project.

A simpler process for employees, management and HR

Vacation Manager for Jira has a number of functionalities (the most important of which we have listed above) assigned to three main groups of people that perform key roles in the vacation management process. The application groups options assigned to each of these groups in order to organise specific tasks. (As you would not allow a situation in which one employee approves a request of another employee of the same position or may access the vacation information of the whole department.) Vacation Manager for Jira takes into account the diversity of vacation management roles, which is why it offers separate menus for the:

• Company employees – all the people that submit vacation requests.
• Management – supervisors who make decisions regarding vacation requests.
• HR team that supervises the provision of all necessary data and monitors statistics.

Each of these groups uses a separate menu with capabilities adjusted to their obligations.

User Menu. An employee may:

• Submit vacation requests and appoint his or her replacement.

• Browse all submitted requests and their statuses (approved/rejected), as well as draft requests that have not been sent for approval yet.

• View his or her statistics and plan vacation based on the days off displayed in the dedicated calendar.

Supervisor Menu. Supervisor options:

• A list of requests for approval. Supervisors have access to all the vacation documents of their teams; they can approve a request straight away, ask for more information (e.g. appointing or changing the replacement), reject a request or cancel a request that they have already approved.

!Important: A project manager / manager and members of the HR team – if they belong to a team, they also have a “user menu” and may submit vacation requests as any other employee.

HR Management

The HR team has an additional tab that enables:

• Creating teams, i.e. groups of users that have the same supervisor, work on the same project and in the same department. Creating teams helps, above all, follow the statistics and develop a work schedule.

• Appointing days off for employees (necessary at the beginning of using Vacation Manager and when entering anyone newly employed into the system; the HR team needs to fill in the employee’s holiday entitlement; this option is used also when an employee takes e.g. maternity leave).

• Holiday Schemes – enables importing a calendar of public holidays (from a file) or manual marking of public, religious or other holidays. Employees do not need to worry that statutory holidays covered by their vacation requests will be deducted from their holiday entitlement.

Workweek Schemes – defining working days of the week – for the entire company or certain teams / employees (e.g. when someone works Saturdays and has Mondays off).

• Monitoring statistics – the HR team may view the statistics by vacation type or by user.

Vacation types

Vacation Manager for Jira makes it possible to define different types of vacation that an employee may request (as new request types in Jira). They are set by the administrator for the entire organisation.

Examples:

• One-day leave (counted in full days)

• Half-day leave (the employee chooses which part of the day he or she wants to take off)

• Hourly leave (the employee may submit a request for 30 minutes or several or a dozen hours off)

Why should you choose Vacation Manager for Jira?

• The application is integrated with Jira – the company may handle its processes within one environment; if it has already been using Jira software, the investment in the application will be more affordable than in the case of a separate solution.
• If the employees already know the Jira system, they will find Vacation Manager very intuitive; the company will save time and money for training.
• Managing vacation in a coherent system simplifies the process for the ENTIRE organisation; it eliminates chain e-mails, the need to print requests, as well as the frustration coming from the lack of statistics for days off.
• The add-on is constantly updated and our specialists are open for contact and feedback.
• We guarantee a free trial period for testing the add-on.

Vacation management, although it may sound trivial, requires completing a number of tasks that, if executed outside of a system, are time-consuming and often cause disruption. Vacation Manager for Jira solves communication problems, makes the whole process smooth and guarantees that the data are complete and stored in one place.