A team member’s holiday time shouldn’t create a nightmare scenario for their colleagues. It just takes a little careful planning to ensure that work can continue smoothly in their absence, writes Christina Rebel of CAD Rooms
Every summer, engineering teams around the country run the same experiment. They’re about to find out whether their preparation has been adequate for work to continue in the absence of that one team member who knows everything.
Your senior engineer is far too familiar with this scenario. It’s Thursday afternoon and Day 3 of a team member’s two-week summer holiday, booked months in advance. Back at the office, someone needs access to a top-level assembly and can’t get it. It’s been checked out since the preceding Friday, and the whole team is now stuck waiting on someone who is blissfully unaware that they’re the only person on Earth who can open the file that six colleagues urgently need.
The alternative isn’t much better. The phone buzzes, breaking the holidaymaker’s tranquility with a supplier query on a component tolerance. It could have waited, but it didn’t – because nobody in the office could open the right file. Two hours later, they find themselves on a video call from their sun lounger, wondering why they booked a holiday in the first place.
It’s August at the time of writing, and I’d bet good money this situation is playing out at a UK company right now.
Already too late
The hurried car park conversation, the shared inbox password on a Post-It note, a pending engineering change order (ECO) left with someone never briefed on why the tolerance matters – these are all reasons why engineers might receive an apologetic phone call at the worst possible moment.
Good preparation starts earlier: if someone’s covering for you, they need time to understand what they’re covering. A design lead who finds out on Wednesday that they’re responsible for Doug’s assembly from Monday isn’t somebody providing cover. They’re a liability.
Teams that manage summer well think about all this in the third week of June: who holds what, where it lives, who has access, and what’s pending in terms of sign-off.
The instinct in engineering is to lock things down, not open them up, and that’s not out of laziness. An out-of-context edit to a released design can come at a real cost: wrong-tolerance builds, mismatched BOMs, unsigned ECOs. But at the same time, there’s a spectrum that lies between “Nobody can touch it” and “Anyone can break it,” and most teams don’t think hard enough about where on that spectrum to sit.
Review permissions matter: seeing a file and commenting on it is different from editing it. A version snapshot before you leave is a simple safeguard, a clear restore point if something goes wrong.
Take the senior engineer pinged about a supplier query on Day 3 of their holiday. They pull up the drawing in a browser, check the dimension, drop a redline note, and close it. Ten minutes, done. It’s still an interruption, but it cost them ten minutes, not the entire afternoon.
Before you go
This might be a good time to start planning for next Summer, so here’s a checklist to help you think ahead. But bear in mind these are all actions you will need to take two to three weeks before you leave, and not the day before.
• Map the knowledge. Write down what only you know, assembly logic, supplier contacts, live approvals. Whoever covers for you needs this, not just the files
• Move critical files somewhere reachable. If it’s on your work laptop or behind a VPN your cover can’t access, it doesn’t exist. Test it first
• Set permissions properly. Your cover needs to view and comment, not edit unsupervised
• Take a version snapshot before you leave
• Brief colleagues on live queries. Anything pending needs a named owner, not a shared inbox
• Test remote access from your own phone. Check you can open a file from a device that isn’t your office machine
• Write an out-of-office that routes people correctly: technical, commercial, suppliers
Out of office
Your goal isn’t to disappear entirely. We all dream of doing that, certainly, but the real goal should be to ensure that if your time off is interrupted, it’s interrupted for a situation that genuinely requires your involvement and is going to take minutes, not hours, to resolve.
Most work-related summer holiday disasters don’t involve unexpected crises. They’re the predictable consequence of preparation that stopped at the Friday handover.
By contrast, by treating the weeks leading up to holiday season as project work in its own right, teams get the gift of engineers who return rested and ready to work. So go ahead and book the Airbnb, but don’t forget the prep. And please enjoy your holiday. You’ve certainly earned it.
About the author:
Christina Rebel is CEO of CAD Rooms and Wikifactory, where she leads the development of cloud-based collaboration solutions for distributed engineering teams.
Her focus is on bringing modern, accessible collaboration tools to engineering teams developing everything from electric vehicles to space tech.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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