The Money Files

The start of a new year can bring intense pressure to get projects up and running quickly – have you felt that? There is often new budget available, new expectations and just the natural sense of new beginnings that comes with a new year… all adding up to a desire from senior leaders to get projects moving quickly.

That makes December the perfect time to prepare, so here are some things you can be doing this month to get ahead for January when it comes.

Review the project pipeline

Assess the projects slated for Q1 and their current status. What’s ready to go, what needs more discovery or analysis? What projects are continuing from this year that still need to complete?

Are there any critical tasks that need attention before January? You can use December to create detailed action plans for January launches, bearing in mind the holiday period and any change freeze that might affect your technical deployments.

Resource planning and allocation

How are you going to make sure that team members are ready and equipped to start strong in January? If there is new budget for training, what projects are coming up where the team could do with some training to ensure they have the skills?

Make sure people know what they will be working on in the new year, and ideally have this documented somewhere – chances are they will come back after a short break and they might have completely forgotten!

Backlog and task prioritisation

If you are anything like me, you’ve probably got a backlog of tasks from the months just gone that haven’t quite been finished. For example, I have project budget trackers that need updating, and I know I’m going to be asked for them by year end because it’s important to have the numbers sorted.

Think about what you have outstanding and prioritise what you need to, focusing on the high-impact tasks first to ease yourself into January.

Prepping tools and processes

Talk to your team about getting things set up for the new year. For us, that’s making sure there are ‘2025’ versions of in-flight projects, setting up the 2025 portfolios and making sure steering meetings are booked for the year – best to get booked into busy executives’ diaries before they are blocked!

Communication and alignment

Because nothing says ‘new year’ more than a redoubled effort at team communication! It might not last longer than February, but let’s start with good intentions, eh?

Think about what the objectives are for the coming year. Set expectations to align on goals, especially if you are starting new work or have different priorities across the portfolio.

For most of us, project work just continues into the new year, because most projects won’t have a hard stop at year end. However, it’s always an opportunity to remind people of what the goals and objectives are, and how these fit with strategic priorities.

Planning ahead in December can help you hit the ground running in January, so you can get back to work after the festive break. I know, the “festive break” is really just a few days, but emotionally and mentally it feels different, don’t you think, because we will be ticking over into 2025?

Are you thinking about year-end project audits? Perhaps your PMO is thinking about how to learn from the past year. Perhaps you want to set a good foundation for projects next year. Perhaps you just had a rubbish past few months and want a second opinion to see if there was anything you could have done differently to avoid the outcomes you got.

Whatever your reason, many project leaders’ thoughts will be turning to audits at this time of year, so let’s talk about how to make the most of this exercise – it’s not as awful as you might be thinking!

Planning the audit

First up, make sure the audit is planned in. Schedule it in advance to ensure key team members are available.

Look out the documentation that is required, which is normally things like financial reports, scope changes, and risk logs. You’ll also want to make sure that the business case, project plan, and schedule are available, as well as any change requests that changed those, so the auditor can compare the original planned baselines to the current baselines.

Key areas to audit

So what is your audit going to look at? Whether you have been asked to audit someone else’s project, or you want projects in your PMO to be audited, here are some things you’ll probably want to put on your checklist.

• Budget vs. actuals: Compare planned spend to actual spend and do the same for resource utilisation if you have the data.
• Scope management: Look at how many change requests the project had and whether that resulted in managed change or scope creep. Personally, I don’t think it is important to assess whether the project stayed within its original scope – what you are looking for is whether changes were assessed and approved rather than being done in an ad hoc manner.
• Risk management: You’ll want to go through the risk log to see how well risks were managed, mitigated, or exploited.
• Quality of deliverables: If anything has been delivered so far, check to see that the quality is comparable to the targets set. In other words, are there post-go live bugs still to sort out, and does the product meet quality expectations?

Identify lessons learned

The main purpose of an audit is to review what worked, what didn’t and what needs to change (or be continued). So you can think of the output of the audit as a sort of lessons learned report. If you already have scheduled lessons learned activities, you can feed those in to the audit report. If not, it never hurts to have a lessons learned conversation with the team.

Set the stage for next year

If your project is running into next year, discuss how the results of the audit can be used to improve processes, define new standards or ways of working, and inform the next year’s project strategy. There might be some easy things you can do to change up how things work to make them more effective.

Whether the outcome is a lot of things to change or the reassurance that you are doing everything right, it’s a good time of year to be reflecting on project management practice. Take stock of where you are and how far the project has come, and if an audit is offered, say yes! It really is a good learning experience.

Last time I wrote about managing the project and the team during the end of year countdown and the holiday period – today I’m thinking about managing stakeholder expectations.

Let’s face it, our stakeholders are also distracted by holidays, year-end processes, and vacations, and we still need to keep them engaged and informed about project work. Here are four practical strategies to keep everything on track at this time of year.

1. Understand their availability

Are they taking time off? You can ask – even senior leaders are likely to be scheduling a break! Their availability (or lack of it) might mean rescheduling project board or steering group meetings, and it’s better to know about that early.

Discuss realistic expectations for responses and turnaround times during December – if you’ve got key members of the project team out of the office, you might need a little longer to get back to them, or they might need to deal with someone else on the team. Pass along any contact details or make introductions beforehand so they know who to talk to – and so that person is aware that senior leaders may be reaching out while they are covering for a colleague.  

2. Prioritise critical deliverables

Make sure you and your stakeholders have a shared view of what deliverables are critical for this period. Define what must be completed before year-end and what can wait. That might already be clear from your project plan, but if you are working in an agile way or in an environment of high uncertainty, it would be worth reiterating what is possible before the end of December.

If you can, think about how you can build flexibility into timelines and make those suggestions. The stakeholders might not understand what goes into completing a task, so they might see something as do-able when in fact it is not. If your office has a mandatory closure or an IT change freeze, that might also eat into the time available to complete work.

A clear list of urgent deliverables and non-urgent tasks can help everyone prioritise, and it’s likely to look different from the last time you created one, because that’s life!

3. Communicate early and often

This is not going to come as a surprise, as communicating early and often is something you’ll be doing all year round. However, at this time of year, there can be a lot of communications, a lot of deadlines and messages can get lost.

Check in to see how they would like to be updated and if that is different from the rest of the year, update your comms plan so you don’t have to ask again next year.

4. Think about stakeholder fatigue

We all need a break, right? Stakeholders are no different. If you’ve been powering on waiting for the holidays, so have they. Think about how you can keep stakeholders engaged during a busy time, maybe cutting the length of meetings, sharing papers earlier so they can read them before a meeting or sending out weekly email updates instead of having status update calls.

Don’t forget to say thank you! We tend to schedule time with the team to celebrate achievements, but our senior leaders were also part of that, so recognise their contribution too. You might be the only one who does…

Good planning and communication can help manage stakeholder expectations even when times are busy – and the run up to year end is definitely busy!

Is your team a remote or hybrid team? It can be challenging to keep projects moving with the same pace during the holiday season, when availability and communication can be limited. Here are a few tips on how to stay on top of your project deliverables over the holidays.

1. Establish availability and schedules

Encourage colleagues to set clear expectations around holiday availability and working hours. For example, they can set out of office messages and identify a delegate in that message so that people know who to go for when they are unavailable.

If you have limits on how many people in the team can be out of the office at the same time, then make sure these are clear and communicated. A project team holiday calendar can make it clear when people are off (although you’ll have to get them to fill it in… always a challenge). There might be times when holidays are unlikely to be approved, for example over a go live period, so flag that in advance so that anyone who needs to book holiday can do so with enough notice.

2. Communicate across time zones

Your remote team might not include people in different time zone, but given that there are multiple time zones in Europe, the US and Australia, as well as elsewhere, even if you are working solely within one region it’s likely you will have colleagues who are keeping different hours to you.

If the holidays mean your working hours are different, make sure everyone knows this. Check that people are aware of the most appropriate ways to stay in touch. For example, Teams is the best way to get me, even when I’m travelling or otherwise out of the office, because it’s on my phone and I literally can’t escape it!

(That’s not to say you should be working on your time off, but if you are working remotely, make sure you can still be contacted.)

3. Adjust project timelines

You might want to adjust the project schedule to account for reduced productivity during December. I know no one wants to admit to being less productive in December, but if you take out time for school concerts, longer, social lunches, plus the impact of the weather and so on, you might find that productivity dips a little. If you’ve got the flexibility in the plan, consider using it.

4. Maintain team morale

The flip side of a productivity dip is a task surge. I don’t know about you, but the last few years have seen me working even more than usual during the run up to year end as we try to get deliverables completed in year.

So consider what you can do to keep morale high, if work is going to be tough. That might be a team celebration (virtually – there are lots of options you can do remotely including quizzes and games) or other ways to connect when team members are scattered and less available.

5. Ensure project continuity

Most importantly, make sure that there is continuity and that the work continues, even when key team members are out. For example, make sure that your documentation is up to date and that knowledge-sharing has happened to avoid bottlenecks. Use the pre-holiday period to review plans with the team and make sure that everyone knows what they have to do.

Whether you are a remote project manager or working with a remote team, it is possible to navigate the holiday period and keep your projects going. It takes a bit of extra effort, a little more stakeholder engagement and a lot more forward planning, but it pays off to know that you can balance work and life, have a wonder holiday period and also stay on top of your work without burning out.

How do you do it? Share your tips in the comments below!

As a project manager, there are two types of self-management I have to do.

Proactive management is looking ahead, making sure I know what is coming up.

Reactive management is addressing the challenges of the day, fire-fighting and being asked to do something on top of my existing workload.

Proactive management

I think proactive management is where most of us should be spending most of our time. We should be looking forward, using risk management, horizon scanning or whatever you want to call it to get a good idea about what’s coming.

For example:

• Future projects that your manager is going to assign to you.
• Upcoming milestones that you need to check in on and make sure are on track.
• Risks that have a close proximity that need active management.
• Engaging stakeholders so they know what is coming (with the goal of reducing ad hoc queries or report requests).
• Big meetings or meetings where you have to prepare documentation or submit proposals/presentations/papers in advance.

These are all things that we should know are happening or about to happen and then we can plan our time appropriately around that.

We find out about these things by staying curious, asking management, putting time aside to review the project schedule alone and with the team, and listening out for things that might be a problem. The more you spot coming, the more you can work around it, or into it so it can be handled at a time that suits you – not at the last minute creating a fire you have to run around and put out.

Reactive management

It’s much harder to manage time when you have to spend it reactively responding to whatever is dumped on your desk that day. It could be a project task that someone else was supposed to do but hasn’t, and just needs to be done, it could be new work to do with your project (like setting up a meeting with 10 attendees that has to be at a particular time but no one has calendar availability at that time… don’t ask me how I know!).

Other examples would be things like:

• A supplier letting you down and not delivering goods on the specified day.
• Someone being off sick and not being available to complete a task that’s on the critical path.
• A senior executive asks for an ad hoc report on project progress for a committee meeting that is tomorrow.

Building resilience in yourself and the team is a good way to manage the short-notice requests and feel more capable of responding in the moment.

In my experience, the better I am at proactively managing upcoming situations on my projects, the less reactive management I have to do – but I know it does not always work that way. Generally, though, the more you can anticipate senior leaders’ needs, complete your risk management actions, identify problems before they become a ‘real’ problem and so on, the less reactive fire-fighting you have to do.

Admittedly, you can’t necessarily foresee that the weather is going to cause problems, or that a supplier might have difficulties fulfilling orders, but if you have identified these are risks, you will at least have (hopefully) spent some time thinking about how they might be mitigated or addressed if they do happen.

Do you spend your time between proactive and reactive management – and is this distinction a helpful way to frame your work? It really works for me, but I don’t know if it’s a common way of thinking for other project managers. Let me know in the comments!