The principles determining the vacation times for project team members essentially exist in every organization, even if these are not formalized as an official procedure. There are always some arrangements in place so that the absence of employees has the least negative impact. Even if a company does not introduce official rules, they will emerge on their own, from the bottom up, initiated by the employees themselves. In many small and even medium-sized organizations, this is often sufficient for the vacations of mid-level employees, and such self-regulation can also have positive effects, such as a sense of responsibility and grassroots maintenance of pressure for good cooperation principles among team members. However, this cannot obscure the fact that formally it is the company that should be responsible for organizing replacements for its employees and, in the long run, burdening an employee with the necessity of finding a replacement for themselves will rather have negative effects.
Regardless of whether substitution policies are formalized or exist only as informal practices, someone should take care of their organization. In the case of a team member's planned absence, the situation is straightforward because, by default, their manager can organize a substitute. Based on project schedules, the manager is capable of arranging the vacation calendar with employees in such a way that the team maintains sufficient operational efficiency to accomplish planned tasks. However, planning substitutions is not always that simple, and the situation becomes significantly more complicated in the absence of managers. Here, the company cannot rely solely on bottom-up planning of substitutions, as while this may work for vacations planned well in advance, in the case of random absences, such as sudden illness, the situation becomes unpredictable. Without proper preparation for such situations, this can lead to enormous chaos. The problem of substituting managers is often an ignored risk in many companies, based on the belief that since nothing bad happened during the previous vacation, the issue is closed, completely forgetting about random situations.

How can one prepare for the absence of a manager?

1. Project Deputy Manager.
An obvious solution seems to be appointing a deputy manager position, who would support the manager's work on a daily basis and replace him during his absence. This solution - although the most effective, is due to the costs designated almost exclusively for very large projects, where the costs of a permanent position for a second manager are justified.

2. Delegating the Manager's Duties to a Senior.
Many companies practice having the manager replaced by the employee with the highest competency level, such as a senior developer or architect. This solution has its advantages, such as the deputy's good knowledge of the project, but also disadvantages: it may turn out that the replacing person has to perform tasks outside their competence, additional duties can affect the performance of standard tasks, which affects the team's efficiency. Finally, such an employee might gain access to information they should not have, e.g., financial.

3. Lack of a Deputy Manager
- Which means deliberately leaving the project without supervision. In such a case, before going on leave, the project manager completes all tasks they know should be done during their absence. In this arrangement, unexpected situations are resolved ad hoc during the leave, with the manager taking the work phone and laptop with them. Unfortunately, this variant is often chosen in small organizations that do not place much emphasis on software development procedures. At first glance, it seems the simplest to implement, but in practice, it is merely ignoring this project risk. Especially in the case of the manager's sudden absence, the lack of procedures and practice for deputy arrangements during planned leaves can lead to significant and difficult-to-reverse project damage. It is necessary to distinguish incidental involvement of the absent manager in emergency situations from the systematic assumption that they will fulfill their duties even while on leave. Aside from the mentioned threats, such an approach infringes on the employee's right to rest and shifts the organization's responsibility to provide a replacement onto them.

How do we approach the issue of manager substitutes at 3e Software House?

We must start by mentioning that our project teams are led by a single manager without any full-time deputies, which excludes the natural migration of duties during absences. Another important rule in our organization is that the project team cannot independently and directly contact the client, making the option of substituting the manager with the most competent team member also unsuitable for us. To ensure project stability in such a model, we built a procedure that minimizes the negative aspects of the manager's absence - both during planned vacations (which is easier) and in unforeseen circumstances.

In our case, we applied a modified version of the first approach, with designated substitutes possessing the appropriate qualifications, though they are not permanent members of the teams. The substitute is a permanent, top-down assigned, manager from another project. The essence of our procedure is to enforce cyclic updates of project knowledge between the manager and their substitute. Such pairs of managers regularly conduct meetings at monthly intervals. The substitute not only obtains information about the current situation in the project at these meetings but also about individual work methodologies in the given project, details of current arrangements, progress, plans, etc. The document that systematizes this knowledge and facilitates its flow is the Project Charter. It is here that the Substitute can find, for example, the exact composition of the project team, contacts to the most important client-side people, links to environments, documentation, auxiliary systems used in the project, a standard calendar of project meetings along with a brief note about the purpose of a particular meeting, and about routine project activities (e.g., billing rules). It's also worth adding that this procedure, as particularly important for the project's security, is regularly monitored in our audit cycles. Of course, maintaining knowledge about an additional project by designated substitutes and monitoring this process is not cost-free. However, we believe that the expenditure is fully justified. The consequences of a manager's unexpected absence can range from minor oversights or delays in stages of realization to serious failures, and, in extreme cases, lead to project failure. We stand by the position that these are risks we cannot afford.