The best course of action for all those questions is establishing proper communication with all team members. While acquiring team members it is the project manager’s responsibility to organize a rough schedule of team members planned vacations/absences. If you preemptively plan around the absences there should be no issues. However, this is a perfect scenario and emergencies occur in the real world, therefore the project manager should be able to maneuver around unplanned absences with contingency plans in place. For the last two questions the mini-sim this week introduced these two problems of resource allocation and team member time. The best resolution to this scenario is to meet directly with those involved in the problem and hash out the problem and look for alternatives in order to drive the project to completion within the scheduled period.