Heading into the Holidays with your Projects in Order

The holiday season often brings stress and competing priorities that can derail critical projects. Get ahead of the year-end frenzy by proactively streamlining communication, clarifying roles, validating resourcing, recalibrating plans, and building in buffers so your team can relax and recharge.

Key Takeaways

• Weekly syncs and clear ownership coverage prevent communication breakdowns as holiday schedules accelerate.
• Reassigning task ownership with defined start and end dates keeps critical decisions moving when regular leads are out.
• Revalidating project staffing against current plans surfaces resourcing gaps before they become blockers.
• Recalibrating estimates and separating must-haves from nice-to-haves protects the timeline without overloading the team.
• Building buffer time before and after the holidays accounts for slower vendor response and post-vacation ramp-up.

As magical as the holiday season tends to be, it can also be a highly stressful period for leaders working on critical projects. Timelines accelerate while priorities compete for limited bandwidth. Amid the flurry of seasonal events and tasks piling up at the office and at home, how do you prevent projects from spiraling out of control?

The key is proactive preparation. Taking steps today to align people, processes, and planning means your team can actually relax and recharge over the holidays.

Streamline Communication

As schedules accelerate leading up to the holidays, communication workflows can become disrupted, leading to misalignment. Set up weekly syncs with project teams to review priority project status, flag any blocking issues, and keep stakeholders informed. Confirm ownership coverage when team members take vacations and verify backups are cross-trained. Stay accessible without micromanaging. Empower people, but have them escalate when risks emerge.

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities

Formally reassign task ownership with start and end dates for periods when team members take vacations. Identify primary points of contact and decision makers for critical processes when regular leads are out. Ensure contingent resources have adequate background context and access permissions provisioned to tools and systems, and align on what critical decisions they are able to make. Clearly articulate must-do priorities that cannot slip during the holidays and require continuous momentum. Beyond formal role reallocation, encourage collaboration across the organization and proactively volunteer bandwidth to support peers when you have availability. Be reasonable in your expectations, since it is a busy time of year for all employees.

Revisit Resource Requirements

Changing priorities and tighter deadlines in the final months may alter your staff and skill needs. Revalidate that project teams are still properly resourced relative to their respective project plans. Develop contingency plans if key members unexpectedly must focus elsewhere, and identify channels to source complementary bandwidth if gaps emerge. Vet the capabilities of on-demand staff augmentation partners like Acceleration Point that could rapidly deploy project managers to fill execution voids on a short- or long-term basis. For teams specifically weighing staffing tradeoffs heading into a busy stretch, Navigating Medical Affairs Staffing: The Juggling Act walks through how contract augmentation bridges talent gaps without a lengthy hiring cycle. Explore flexible support options that allow you to scale bandwidth up or down based on situational demands.

Crunch the Project Plan Numbers

Conduct project plan health checks with each delivery team to reassess the level of effort and durations remaining. Recalibrate bottom-up estimates if assumptions have changed, removing padding if no longer necessary. Clearly separate must-have priorities from nice-to-have items that could slip without consequence, and focus energies accordingly. Develop contingency plans for schedule slippage and help teams smooth aggressive delivery curves where possible. Teams pulling in outside support for a specific initiative, such as an MSL joining a home-office project, benefit from the same discipline. 3 Ways to Increase MSL Success in Projects covers how to set clear expectations and protect a contributor's time so the engagement pays off for everyone involved.

Build in Time Pre- and Post-Holidays

Recognize that projects will move slower leading up to the year-end holidays. Vendors and stakeholders will also be taking vacations, so adjust plans, tame expectations, and insert buffers appropriately. Upon returning to work, team members may also need to catch up on progress while they were away, which takes time. Factor this ramp-up period into your planning cycle.

With some disciplined preparation, you can protect your critical projects and ensure team members can fully recharge without the stress of work weighing on them during the festive season.

Wishing you Happy Holidays filled with joy and prosperity! Let our team know if our project management and business process outsourcing teams could help alleviate your workload heading into the new year.

FAQ

Why do projects tend to slip during the holiday season?
Holiday schedules compress available working days while team members take vacations, vendors slow down, and personal commitments compete for attention. Without proactive planning, this combination leads to missed deadlines and unclear ownership.

How far in advance should teams prepare for holiday-season project risk?
Preparation works best when it starts several weeks before the holidays, giving teams time to reassign ownership, validate resourcing, and build schedule buffers before the year-end crunch hits.

What is staff augmentation, and how does it help during the holidays?
Staff augmentation means bringing in outside project managers or specialists on a short- or long-term basis to fill execution gaps. It gives teams a way to scale bandwidth up during a busy stretch without a lengthy hiring process.

What should teams do when they return to work after the holidays?
Teams should build a ramp-up period into their planning cycle to account for the time needed to catch up on progress that happened while they were away, rather than expecting an immediate return to full speed.

Further Reading:

• Navigating Medical Affairs Staffing: The Juggling Act → https://www.accelerationpoint.com/resources/navigating-medical-affairs-staffing-the-juggling-act/
• 3 Ways to Increase MSL Success in Projects → https://www.accelerationpoint.com/resources/3-ways-to-increase-msl-success-in-projects/