You CAN keep a project moving during the holidays….

For our project management question of the month, we asked the team to send their tips and tricks for keeping a project moving forward during the holiday season.

Kristin Niemi-Gillig
I’ve found the following tips do help keep a project moving.

• Ask for holiday schedules in November, and then ask again in December since some people are usually still finalizing their plans.
• Identify work that can be done by the people “holding down the fort” and then determine what inputs are necessary for them to get started. Be sure to hold necessary calls or meetings so that decisions can be made and they have what they need to work while others are out.
• Schedule a “welcome back/let’s get started again meeting” right after the holiday.

Ashleigh Lambert:
Something that has helped me since I’ve started is recording schedules, key dates where people won’t be available, vacations, etc on my client weekly agenda in Central Desktop. I suppose this only works if both you and the client regularly use a collaborative tool. But it has worked well for me, as both our internal team and the client can reference it in a central location and update it regularly.

I also concur with Kristin about checking in regularly (weekly even) to confirm priorities, assess anything new that’s coming up, consider who will be staffed during the key holiday days for troubleshooting, etc.

Andy Dimock:
From the onset of a project I try to plan on avoiding any client dependent interactions or approvals during the week of Thanksgiving and the 1.5 weeks around Christmas and New Year. I make sure that the actual holidays are set as non-working times in my initial (and subsequent) Microsoft Project plans and I assume 25-50% more time will be required for any tasks during those time periods. Now, that is not to say that the project is planned to halt during those periods. Rather it is planned such that work along the critical path will continue while concomitantly accepting the reality of the situation – that things will move slower during those holiday periods.

Jeff Herron:
Holidays must actively be planned around otherwise the delays are greater than just the time out of office. Weekly reminders and actively planning tasks with the client are key to keeping things moving ahead of the holidays and to avoid inevitable slow starts upon returning from holidays.

Amanda O’Malley:
Generally, if a project is going to happen through a holiday period, in the initial plan I will try to avoid scheduling deadlines/deliverables that the client has to be involved in too close to the holidays and allow a bit more time for internal schedules to avoid an unexpected delay later.  Once we get a few weeks out from holidays I will typically make that part of the weekly check in discussions, first to find out everyone’s vacation schedules and then check in for any changes for the next few weeks up to the holiday.  I usually try to shift tasks/staffing around as soon as outages are identified and I will also keep the client notified on how we plan to keep things moving through the holiday period (even if it is a limited effort).  Also, I will try to make sure that any immediate decisions or feedback needed from the client are in a bit before they become unavailable so that there is time to communicate any questions.

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