Are you gearing up for the holidays? There’s a lot to do as we count down to the end of the year! For me in the UK, it’s a Christmas break that I’m looking forward to, but the tips below work for whatever festivity or holiday project planning you are gearing up for as a team.
I’ve been caught out a couple of times (change freeze, anyone?) so in this article I’m sharing my tips for how to manage your work over the festive season.
Christmas creates a temporary change to the operating environment of your project.
People are away. Decisions take longer. Financial deadlines move forward. Steering meetings may need rescheduling. Suppliers may have reduced capacity. And the people who normally know how to resolve an issue might be sitting around a log fire somewhere.
Some proactive planning upfront will make it a lot easier for you to switch off properly when you down tools for the break.
Holiday project healthcheck
Here’s my main tip for managing projects in the festive season. Before December, check:
- People: Who is away and when?
- Decisions: Which decisions could be blocked because someone is absent?
- Deadlines: Which reporting, finance or delivery deadlines have moved?
- Governance: Which steering groups/CABs/PMO meetings are changing?
- Technology: When does the change freeze start and end?
- Suppliers: Which external organisations have reduced availability?
- Budget: Do you need additional resource or overtime?
- Risks: What could realistically go wrong because of the holiday period?
- Communication: Who needs to know what before everyone disappears?
- January: What needs to happen immediately when people return?
Does that sound a lot? OK, let’s break that down a bit!
1. Check your project deadlines
Identify the key holiday dates and deadlines. Deadlines shift in December as documentation needs to be submitted earlier. Check out the deadlines for:
- End of month reporting
- Submitting your expenses
- Completing accruals and financial reporting.
In my experience, everything moves earlier, so the onus is on you as the project manager to hit the earlier dates. I block time in my calendar every month for this kind of routine project management task, so I move those slots forward to make sure I can meet the new expectations for December.
And don’t forget some of your colleagues will be out of the office. Make sure you have their holiday dates in your calendar.
Managing projects over the holiday season is made more tricky by people winding down towards the end of the year, so you might see productivity levels drop. Factor that in to timings for tasks if necessary.
2. Map availability and capacity
Christmas project planning needs to factor in something you don’t have to consider at other times of the year: people might technically be available, but not have the same amount of capacity as they would do at other times.
Someone being technically available on 27 December doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be operating at normal project capacity.
Colleagues could be:
- Available, therefore working normally
- Partially available, checking in but not ideal for critical work
- Unavailable, on leave
- Unavailable for decisions, perhaps technically working but the decision-maker isn’t accessible.
Identify where absence creates a dependency for decisions or where work might have to wait.
3. Bring forward governance and decision-making
PMO and project governance deadlines can move as we saw above, and steering meetings can move too. If your stakeholders are taking holiday, they may not be available for meetings.
I normally schedule steering meetings in the third week of the month so we’ve got the financials complete from the previous month to report on. That doesn’t work in December when a lot of people are off from around the 20th. So look at your meeting calendar and change anything that needs changing.
Review your project timeline for any project deadlines over Christmas. Set realistic deadlines taking into account any expected absence or disruption.
Check your decision bottlenecks
Before the holiday period, look at:
- decisions due before Christmas
- decisions needed to keep January work moving
- approval thresholds
- who can approve in someone’s absence
- decisions that can be delegated
- decisions that have to wait.
One unavailable stakeholder can hold up an entire workstream, so try to bring forward any critical decisions into mid-December if you can.
4. Plan around the change freeze
Most IT departments will instigate a change freeze over the holidays. This is so that changes don’t go into the live technical environments when there aren’t enough people around to test them or to deal with the fallout if they go wrong.
Your IT team should publish the change freeze dates well in advance, so you can plan project deliverables around them.
The process I’m familiar with is that there is a Change Advisory Board (CAB) which meets and approves changes to go into production, so the release manager can prepare and implement technical changes.
You’ll need to know when the last CAB meeting is, and what is the last date for putting changes into live if you have deliverables that need to go into production before the end of the year.
If you can wait until next year, make sure you’ve got the date of the first CAB meeting in your diary and have the submission deadlines to get your project change on the agenda.
Change freeze checklist
If your project has technical deliverables, check:
- When does the change freeze start?
- When is the last CAB?
- What’s the deadline for submitting a change?
- Who needs to approve it?
- When can changes resume?
- What’s the first CAB date in January?
- What happens if the release misses the deadline?
Finally on the subject of Christmas change freezes, don’t assume “change freeze” means “nothing can happen”.
Emergency changes may still be possible, but the process, approvals and available resources may be different. I’ve had projects need emergency changes before and it’s been fine, but you do need to know who to go to!
5. Check suppliers and external dependencies
Ask key suppliers:
- What are your Christmas opening/closure dates?
- Who is providing support?
- Is there an emergency contact?
- What are your last order/delivery dates?
- Will response times change?
- Are any planned releases or maintenance windows affected?
- Your account manager or the supplier project manager will normally reach out to you with this information well in advance, but in case they don’t, be ready to ask for it so you can plan.
6. Review your year-end project budget
Project teams want to celebrate success together, so it’s worth allocating extra budget for holiday-specific expenses, if your project is going to run over year end or any other festive period.
Pro tip
I would also plan for potential cost overruns due to holiday delays. When people are out of the office, you might need budget for additional resources to plug the gaps. If you can’t get approval for the funds to do that, then you might have to adjust the timelines so the project will cost more anyway as the dates overrun.
You might have to factor in overtime. For example, if you have a colleague who is salaried and exempt from overtime taking leave, then another colleague might need to step in. That colleague might be eligible for overtime payments. Or you might need more overtime budget to cover for people who are out.
Read next: The only guide you need to resource management in projects.
7. Update holiday risks and contingencies
In your next risk management workshop or conversation, identify and plan to mitigate common year end-related risks if they aren’t already in your RAID log.
Examples that I’ve seen related to managing projects over Christmas include:
- Work slips because of lack of resource
- Decisions don’t get made because decision-makers are absent
- Budget may go over due to unexpected expenses or additional resource costs
Have a think about contingency planning for unexpected challenges. This is nothing more than you’d normally do on a project, so it’s just looking at your workload with a ‘holiday’ lens.
8. Communicate before everyone logs off
How flexible should you be with holidays? As a project leader, it’s unlikely that the team work directly for you. Whether they do or not, my default position has always been to be as accommodating as possible. I don’t think I’ve ever said no to anyone requesting leave. We’ve always found ways around it.
Even so, you still have to find ways to communicate effectively with the team, before they go away and after they are back, so keep communication channels open.
Think about who is left behind so you balance their workload and ensure team well-being – no one wants to have to pick up the slack for a colleague at the best of times, so doing it over the holidays is even less appealing. Update the IT helpdesk if you are anticipating more problems than normal on your program or the software your project affects.
Team morale can take a dip if the team is stretched thin, so bring in extra resource if you can, or where it’s possible, stagger holiday time. Personally, I’ve often felt that bringing in extra resource is more of a headache than a help as you have to onboard them, get them up to speed and so on, which can take your time away from your own work.
9. Prepare for the first week back
Before you log off in December, make sure you know:
- What’s due in the first week of January
- What decisions are waiting
- Which meetings need to happen
- Which tasks need to restart
- Whether any deadlines have changed
- Who needs a project update (the normal stakeholders or will someone else be expecting a status report the day you get back to your desk?)
- What information your team will need to get moving again.
January problems are often created in December, so some proactive planning before the festive period can save you delays in the first weeks of the new year.
Before you close your laptop
Before you close your laptop and log off for Christmas, spend an hour or so getting into the right mindset for winding down and also gearing back up.
The project doesn’t stop just because the organisation slows down but getting your project ready for year end isn’t difficult. It simply needs you to proactively factor it in to your planning. Think ahead, and:
- Review resource plans
- Reorganize governance and other meetings
- Plan around any holiday-specific deadlines like earlier reporting dates and a change freeze
- Communicate with your team
- Plan for January!
Enjoy the holidays!
