Team absence planning with approvals in Jira

The problem

Time-off requests arrive by e-mail or chat, approvals are informal, and the only overview is somebody’s spreadsheet. Different teams want different people to decide, and nobody wants the person on leave to approve their own request.

Step by step

1. Absence types. Keep the starting set (vacation, sick leave, training, other) or define your own labels, and mark the sensitive ones.
2. Approvers. Set a sitewide approver pool of users or Jira groups. Where a group should decide for itself, add a team with its own approvers; its members can be picked by hand or taken from an existing Atlassian Team.
3. Request. Team members request absences from their personal settings and follow the status in their own list.
4. Decide. Approvers approve or decline in the approval queue, optionally with a note the requester sees.
5. Overview. The Team tab shows a month calendar of who is away on which day, with a detailed list beside it. You decide whether everyone sees everyone, only their own team, or only their own absences.

What to watch out for

A team approver can decide only requests from their own team; the pool and Jira administrators can decide anyone’s, nobody their own. If the pool is empty and no team applies, only Jira administrators can decide a request: fill the pool or switch approvals off. Someone in several teams is routed to the first of them, in the order of the Teams section.