Gantt Calendars functionality info

This is a new functionality that allows you to define user calendars through defining specific work items (Calendar, Time Off, Time On, Tweak).
In the previous article, we've already spoken about the Polarion Project configuration: click here

Now we can focus more on the functionality that this feature brings.

Polarion Project as Working Calendar

As we know not every company is using the Polarion User Management section to manage User Calendars, holidays, vacations, and so on.

So the idea is to have a separate Polarion project, which will represent the working calendar for the users.

And later on, you can refer to this Calendars Project for all other Polarion projects.

For these cases, we've come up with a solution, where you can handle user management in specific Work items that we provided.

- There are 4 new Work Item Types this functionality brings:

Calendar: General time schedule; Global or for Specific users. 

Specify the work structure that would be applied as the base. 

Time Off: Global or User-specific days off. 

Specify the Global days Off for all users or Off days for specific users.

Time On: Used to overwrite days Off, if someone has to work when the parent Calendar is set to Off.

Tweak: time exception to specify if someone works partly for a specific period of time.

Below we'll describe some sample use cases for these new WI types:

Calendar:

Below there is an example of a Calendar WI that works as a base calendar for user-specific Calendars.

For Calendars that inherit the structure of this Base Calendar, you may keep these fields empty and fill in only the fields that differ from the Base calendar.

In the example below you may see that all custom fields are empty except for Wednesday, which means that John's Calendar inherits all values from the Base Calendar, except the fact that on Wednesdays he is not working.

And if we check it from the Gantt view we'll see that John's is OFF on Wednesdays on a Calendar level. 

Time Off: 

In cases when someone needs to be OFF not on a regular basis but as a schedule exception(vacation, holiday, etc.) Time OFF WI becomes useful.

As well as it is with Calendars, it is possible to specify Time Off on different levels: global and user-specific.

So in case there is a global holiday under the Global Calendar we just create a Global day Off and it will be applied to all the calendars, that inherit Global Calendar.

And on the Gantt chart, you can see that Global Time Off 2 was applied to everyone.

The same approach goes to creating days Off for specific users.

Time On:

In situations when there are some global holidays or other Off days, but a specific user still has to be working, you can use "Time On" WI.

Time On overwrites Time Off, so even though there is an Off time, for that specific user it will not be counted.

You can see an example of it in the screenshot above. 

There is a Global Days Off on November 23-24, but for John, there is a Time On on November 24. This is why, as you can see, there is no off time for him on that date.

Tweak:

There are also can be situations when users have to work on a slightly different schedule for a specific period of time.

For these cases, we can specify a Tweak WI.

There is an example of a Tweak for Steve, where we specified that on the 27th of October, he is working only from 8:00 to 9:00.

It results in Steve's capacity being set to 1h for this specific period of time.

So now if we open a Polarion project, which we connected to the Calendars Project, we'll see that Steve's capacity for the given day equals 1 hour only, exactly as we set it in Steve's Tweak.

How to enable the "Work Item Calendar" functionality:

-  documentation on how to create the Polarion Configuration: click here

In case of questions please contact support@nextedy.com