The Agile PM Toolkit Series - Holiday Wall

Our teams need some kind of visual indicator about availability of team members on a given day/week. In order to facilitate this, I have been using a holiday wall in order to bring this visibility on the table.

Below is a picture of holiday wall in 2 of my projects.

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A holiday wall is a very simple matrix with names of team members and dates. Team members indicate planned vacations/time off on this wall by marking a simple cross. We typically try to maintain a visibility of 2 weeks and typically update this on a Mon or Fri.

A visual wall is useful when,

• Signing up for stories - you wouldn't want to start a story by a pair where both are off for next few days or you will ensure that team member who has a planned vacation pairs with some one who is not on vacation at that time.
• Deciding in what to sign-up for an iteration - you will sign-up for less, if the number of people available on the team are lesser 
• Setting expectations with stakeholders
• Informing team of your plans in advance

A holiday wall is useful for planned vacation and any adhoc/unplanned leaves are not updated here. Its good to talk about them during standup.

For planned leaves which are beyond the period on the wall, we use a google calendar or put it as comments on the wall. 

A point to note is that this is not a substitute for communication, and team members definitely call out about their availability and planned vacations. The wall is just a visual indicator.