Using Away Schedules to Manage Availability

Away Schedules provide a way to manage the availability of your resources by marking them as unavailable during specific periods. This feature is essential for accurately maintaining your team’s capacity and ensuring tickets and tasks are assigned to available resources only.

Key Features:

1. Open-Ended End Date: Mark a resource as unavailable indefinitely until manually flagged as available.
2. Start and End Date: Schedule a specific period of unavailability.

When to Not Use

Away Schedules indicate to the Escalation Service that a resource is Unavailable, and thus not eligible for ticket assignment. If you want a resource to show as Available for ticket assignment, but busy for a certain day/time each week, instead use Rocketship’s Recurring Schedules. Additionally, if you want a resource to “toggle” as available/unavailable for a certain Tier within an Escalation Rule, e.g., only being Available after-hours, then use Scheduling Constraints.

Impact on Rocketship

Escalation Engine:

The Escalation Engine automatically excludes resources marked as away from ticket assignments. This ensures no new tickets are assigned to an unavailable resource.

Scheduling Engine:

The Scheduling Engine treats resources marked as away as busy for the duration of the Away Schedule. This means that even if an Away Schedule is not open ended, the resource may not be assigned new tickets because they appear too busy for the given timespan. That said, the Scheduling Engine may still find time slots before/after the Away Schedule to schedule work.

Use Cases

1. Vacation Time: Schedule a resource as unavailable for a planned holiday.
2. PTO: Set a start and end date for a resource’s personal time off.
3. Sick Leave: Create an open-ended schedule if the return date is uncertain, updating it once the resource is available again.
4. Multiple Schedules: Add multiple Away Schedules to account for overlapping or future unavailability.

Creating an Away Schedule

1. Log into the WorkBoard via Autotask
2. Click on Manage->Resources
3. Set the Resource to Away or Available

This creates an “open ended” Away Schedule for the resource and is the best way to flag a resource as “Out Sick”.

Creating a Defined Away Schedule

This is used to define both the start and end date.

1. Log into the WorkBoard via Autotask
2. Click on Manage->Away Schedules
3. Click New
4. Choose the impacted resource and their start/end.
5. You can optionally enter a note.

Best Practices

1. Plan Ahead: Use Away Schedules for planned absences to ensure smooth operations.
2. Review Regularly: Periodically audit open-ended schedules to confirm they are still valid.
3. Communicate Changes: Notify team members about Away Schedules to avoid confusion in task delegation.