Five Tips to Holiday-Proof Your Project Schedule
Summer is over, and fall weather is starting to set in, which means you can get back to a regular contingent of staff. This means no more juggling resources and complex schedules to accommodate everyone’s summer getaways. However, the holiday season is quickly approaching. Now is the time to plan ahead to avoid unnecessary stress, major issues, and missed deliverables.
Unlike summer vacations, many people want to take time off on the same days during the holidays. So rather than having to manage a few people absent at a time, you may now be faced with most of your project team being gone at the same time. How do you successfully manage a large absence of staff and still keep your project on track? Here are our five tips for holiday-proofing your project schedule.
1. Create A Solid Plan
As with any project, a solid plan is mandatory. The question remains: how do you make a solid plan, especially early on in a project, when people have not yet committed to designated time off during the holiday season? Careful consideration of such factors is needed when developing a plan. There are certain simple planning assumptions that will make this daunting task easier.
Many project managers follow the mantra that “Nothing gets done the last two weeks of the year.” This has validity, so those last two weeks must be appropriately identified and accounted for in a project’s plan. Depending on specific circumstances, it may also need to be identified as a risk. In addition to adding at least two weeks of contingency to your schedule in December, you will want to consider time around Thanksgiving and the New Year. You may need to add time to the end of your schedule when you first build it, or “crash” some tasks together after the holidays to stay on track.
2. Avoid Major Deliverables
The ‘rule of thumb’ is simply to not plan for any major deliverables during the holidays. Of course, this is not always possible, but the objective is to try to minimize deliverables to relieve stress for all, allowing your team to get a much-deserved rest and return motivated to engage immediately after the holidays. However, if there are any significant deliverables during the holidays, everyone on the project team needs to be aware of the deliverables and timeline. If the schedule demands it, you must communicate early with the team that they may not get much, if any, extra time off during the holidays.
3. Plan Resource Availability
In addition to holiday time off, another common resourcing issue during this time is competing with other work efforts. Since many employees will be taking time off, those that remain will be busier, and therefore less available for project efforts. Although resource contention is most likely to only affect staff, it is possible that contract resources may be impacted as well. Your project is not exempt from this risk just because you are using contract resources.
4. Adopt Code/Change Freezes
Some organizations implement code and/or change freezes during the holiday season. This generally proves to be wise considering such a large portion of the organization may be taking time off. These types of freezes do not generally apply to maintaining and supporting existing production systems, but rather to ‘voluntary’ changes. These changes and code freezes may start as early as mid-November but more generally are early to mid-December and run through the New Year holiday into early January. It is imperative to account for these code/change freezes within your schedule.
5. Anticipate Special Processing and/or Reporting Needs
Many organizations have very specific needs for year-end reports. This is especially true of organizations which have fiscal years that coincide with the calendar year. Since this is a one-time processing and reporting issue, organizations may have to leverage additional resources to complete this work within the short time allotted. These efforts may draw resources away from your project, so it is imperative that you are aware of the schedule and priority of other year-end activities and plan for their impact to your project.
These are just a few items that can impact a project’s resources, and therefore schedule and budget, as the holiday season approaches. There are other factors that are subject to each project, so identifying and documenting all constraints, issues and risks specific to your project will reduce your risk, increase confidence in your project’s schedule, and help team members return in the new year with a renewed motivation to make the project succeed.