I'm working on a team that's distributed across several locations, time zones, and managers. Quite often, some team member needs to know if or or more other team members are generally available, or on leave.
What means can you think of to efficiently make this information available to everyone?
What doesn't work
- Individual's Outlook calendar. It's way too clumsy to determine availability of a group of people in this way. You need to start creating a meeting, add the individuals and hope that their calendar is up-to-date. Managers have no easy way of seeing if their team members have put in their vacations.
- An Outlook calendar shared by someone. Also clumsy, and doesn't work if people move on.
- Excel. Not really. No concurrent access.
- The corporate leave management. Not accessible across organizational teams due to missing permissions.
What I don't want/need
Yes, I know there are commercial leave management systems with nice web interfaces. But I don't want to manage people's leave -- that's what HR does. I only want to make leave known to other team members. For instance on Confluence, but how?