With summer holidays kicking off, we wanted to share some helpful ways you can help prepare your team for some well deserved time out of the office while ensuring that your requests and projects stay on track.
With many of your team members likely taking time off over the next few months, it’s important to put in place some contingency plans to account for vacation and other days away from work.
It’s likely that you’ve chosen a few team members to be the default request owners for any new intake submissions. We’d recommend having your Cognota admin open your request forms and review who these owners are and coming up with a plan for any time away.
If you only have one Request Owner for a given form, assigning a back-up and ensuring you’ve got a good process in place to manage these requests is important. This will make sure that the request pipeline keeps moving and you’re able to liaise with any requestors as timely as possible.
If you have multiple Request Owners, ensuring that they are aware of any time off that the others may be taking is also a good approach.
If you’re using Cognota to track and manage team capacity, it’s important to remind your colleagues to input their time-off.
This can be accessed in the users personal settings by clicking on their profile icon in the top right corner.
Here they can input any dates that they will be away and this will then be accounted for in the Capacity sections of the platform.
It’s a great way to ensure that you’re taking into account the actual hours your team will be working over the next few months to make sure to accurately forecast project timelines.
In upcoming team meetings, we’d recommend that you pull up your Project list and do a quick review of what you have due between now and the end of September.
An easy way to do this is to navigate to your Project List and apply filters based on Target Completion Date.
This will allow you to see a drilled down list of everything you’re hoping to complete over the summer months and highlight any areas of risk as a team based on time away.
How are you spending your summer? We want to hear your plans and any tips you have for planning during this time of year. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach us at support@cognota.com.
