Hub Planner today unveils two brand new and powerful Extensions added to the Hub Planner arsenal of value added features. Introducing Vacation & Annual Leave Management and Resource Request & Approval Workflow extensions. Both of these extensions not only introduce new functionality to Hub Planner but also a new workflow for handling requests from your team.
What does this mean for the Team Player?
Each team member will now be able to request their vacation or annual leave time off directly from the scheduler, request forms or new dashboard request page. Everyone receives a brand new Vacation Dashboard where they can manage and get an easy overview of how much vacation time they have taken and how much they can continue to take out. On top of that they get new visibility into how many sick days they have been consuming for the year and also any public holidays that are coming up. In the scheduler they will be able to always get a sense of the status of their requests, as they will be visibly populate into the scheduler for them. Lastly they will have new email notifications they can configure in their profile that can alert them when someone approves their request. Happy days!
How will this benefit Project Managers or those Managing a team?
The benefits are going to realized quite quickly when using these extensions. You will be able to handle and view all requests in a new centralized dashboard, this allows you to focus and manage all requests from one place. You also will have the ability to manage requests directly from emails, without even needing to login and lastly you can manage the requests directly from the scheduler. Managing the requests from the scheduler gives you the perfect insight and visibility in what is happening in the team and provide you with valuable information on weather you can approve the request or not.
Custom Vacation Allowance Per Resource & Custom Default Approvers
Each resource can be allocated with their own set of vacation days. You will be able to set a global amount in the settings and then override this on a resource level. Approvers can easily be set in the system and you will also be able to set up default approvers and teams of approvers. This will be very useful for those who have set teams and always want their requests to go to that person.
You can now Request Resources on Projects
A common problem we hear from our customers is that some resources tend to get booked up all the time by other people in the company. Weather that is due to those resources being the best in the company or perhaps some project managers getting in there faster than others to schedule. Resource requesting creates a great workflow for breaking this down into an approval process. Now your colleagues can request a resource or multiple resources on a project, but an approver will need to decide and approve the requests.
The Transparency of Vacation or Annual Leave Requests are Critical to Scheduling your Team Effectively.
The last thing a project manger wants is to not see the vacation requests coming until its too late and someone has to get disappointed or forced decisions are made within projects. We want to avoid this at all costs, so letting your team request vacation is ideal. For the Project Manager approving these requests, they can quickly look at the scheduler, see the request and visualize any other bookings around that which may be a conflict. Having the ability to inline approve and resolve these requests is an invaluable workflow to create a solid schedule.
