Work Item Calendar

Work Item Calendars allow you to set a specific Polarion project with dedicated WIs as a calendar. Due to this, you can define user-specific schedules, including working days, time off, and exceptions, such as working for fewer hours a day. This feature is particularly useful for managing resource availability and capacity planning without relying on external calendar integrations.

A structured approach to scheduling involves setting up a dedicated calendar project. This allows you to centrally manage users schedules. Later on, this project can be referenced by other projects as needed. To make the setup process easier, we’ve also provided a pre-configured template.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Download the WI Calendars template
• Understand key Polarion configurations 
• Enabling the WI Calendar functionality
• Set up company and user calendars
  • Company (global) calendar
  • User-specific calendar
• How to use the WI calendar
  • Time Off
  • Time On
  • Tweak

Download the WI Calendars template

1. Download the package from https://www.nextedy.com/product/nextedy-gantt/#download 
2. Locate the template file nextedy_gantt.zip/com.nextedy.polarion.gantt/template/WorkItemsCalendarTemplate.zip
3. Upload it as a Project Template into Polarion via the Project Templates global administration page
4. Verify that the template “Nextedy Gantt Calendars” template shows up among the custom templates

        -> Create a new project based on this template

Understand key Polarion configurations 

The template comes pre-configured, but understanding the key Polarion settings used is essential. Navigate to Administration > Work Items > Enumerations

Calendars introduce four key work item types:

    Calendar - defines default working hours (global or user-specific users)

    Time Off - specifies global or user-specific non-working periods 

    Time On - overrides global time off, if someone has to work when the company calendar is set to off

    Tweak - fine-tunes specific work hours (e.g., half-days).

Work Item relationships are defined through Link Roles:

Weekday settings are managed through Enumerations, allowing for predefined workdays.

Each Work Item Type uses custom fields. You can review these under: Administration > Work Items > Custom Fields

Enabling the WI Calendar functionality

nextedy.gantt.workitemCalendar.projectId=<PROJECTID>
nextedy.gantt.workitemCalendar.globalID=<WORKITEMID>

nextedy.gantt.workitemCalendar.projectId=<PROJECTID>
nextedy.gantt.workitemCalendar.globalID=<WORKITEMID>

NOTE! This configuration must be applied to both the calendar project and any projects that will use it.

Set up company and user calendars

Now here's the logic behind global and user-specific calendars:

Company (global) calendar

Below there is an example of a calendar WI that works as a base calendar for user-specific calendars. In edit mode click on + New and don't add a parent for this one. You can set the company working hours through the weekday Custom Fields. 

User-specific calendar

When adding a new user calendar, set the previous company calendar as parent, this way it inherits the structure of the global calendar. So you may keep weekdays empty and fill only the fields that differ from the global calendar.

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

How to use the WI calendar

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:

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. On the screenshot below, we have a Global Time Off, but for Phillip there is a Time On:

Tweak

There 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 WI Calendar 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:

If you need any assistance, feel free to reach out to us by submitting a ticket here.