Capacity Planning: Managing Public Holidays for Distributed Teams

The first team I managed was collocated, which made tracking public holidays easy. I’d simply refer to a single source of truth, usually an official government page, and everything was straightforward.

Things became more complex when I started managing teams across multiple countries and even different states within Australia. Suddenly, I found myself pulling public holiday data from various sources, piecing it together into a Confluence page, and constantly updating holidays that depended on lunar calendars or other shifting factors.

Some holidays don’t fall on the same date every year, making planning less predictable. For instance, Easter Sunday can land anywhere between late March and late April, depending on the lunar cycle. Eid’s dates are similarly determined by moon sightings. Then there are holidays like Australia Day, which have fixed dates but when it falls on a weekend it’s observed on a working day. Keeping track of all these combinations for multiple countries was a nightmare.

What should have been a simple task quickly turned into a maintenance headache. Important? Yes. But also, incredibly repetitive and tedious.

After some research, I found that Google Calendar provides public holiday calendars that can be added directly. That helped, but it didn't solve the challenge of accurately forecasting capacity for future sprints. So, I created an API client to pull the data that I can then cross-reference with the engineers’ location to identify when they’d be unavailable.

Here’s a code snippet on how I achieved it.

//dotnet add package DevExLead.Integrations --version 0.2.1-g3f62bbd878
//using DevExLead.Integrations.GoogleCalendar;
var googleCalendarConnector = new GoogleCalendarConnector("{{Google API Key}}", false);
var googleCalendarPublicHolidays = await googleCalendarConnector.GetPublicHolidaysAsync("{{CountryId}}");

Check out the full list of Google Calendar IDs here.

Have you faced a similar challenge? How did you handle it?

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Until next time, keep learning!