The Money Files

Are you winding down for the end of year festivities? Whatever that looks like for you, here are 10 things to consider when heading into the holidays.

1. Thank your team

I’m sure you do this all the time anyway, but as a gentle reminder, this is a great time of year to be thanking people for the work they have done over the past 12 months.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money (or any money). A digital card, a message on your corporate internal social network, a thank you in person or on email: it all makes a difference.

2. Thank your suppliers

Suppliers have had a tough year, just like the rest of us. Rising costs and clients who have had to scale back their plans as a result of belt-tightening have made it a difficult economic climate for many, especially small businesses.

3. Organise a celebration

Whether it’s a Christmas jumper day, a lunch out to mark the end of another year and still being together as a team, or simply the option of meeting in person, try to find some time to celebrate what you have achieved this year.

Look back at the projects that the team delivered, or the successes that have happened on your journey in your current project. Find something that everyone can do, so your celebration is inclusive.

4. Remember that payment runs are early

Back to business: payment runs are early in December. Your Finance team might be processing everything a week or so before the normal cutoffs to account for people being out of the office or bank deadlines due to the holiday season.

Make sure you get any invoices or expense claims in on time so you don’t miss out.

5. Be prepared for the change freeze

Your IT department probably has a change freeze planned for the holiday period. This is a time when they won’t make changes to production systems, normally because they are running with a reduced staff due to people taking time off. It might also be because it’s a busy time of year for your business and they don’t want to do anything that would mess stuff up.

If your project needs IT changes, talk to them about the dates for the freeze and get your change requests to the CAB (Change Advisory Board) as soon as you can.

6. Do your accruals

If the end of the calendar year coincides with the end of your financial year, you might have to do accruals. This is where you financially account for items that have not yet been delivered but have been ordered, or have been delivered but haven’t yet been invoiced.

Talk to your finance team about what they need from you. In my old job, we used to get a form to complete from Finance that detailed all the info they needed about open purchase orders so they could close the books for the year.

7. Send feedback to line managers

If you have benefited from having subject matter experts on your team, take a moment to send some feedback to them and their line manager about their contribution to your project. That can be included in their performance appraisal.

8. Prep for your end of year review

On the topic of appraisals, if you have an end of year review coming up (ours are often in January), take half an hour or so to document what you have achieved this year so you can reference it in your meeting.

9. Be mindful of other people’s leave

Even if you aren’t taking much (or any) time away from the office, your colleagues may well be. Try to bear in mind their leave dates so you aren’t bothering them with emails during their break.

10. Set your out of office

It’s time to take a break from the office, so update your out of office message and let people know who to contact while you are away.

Now all that is done, you can rest up and enjoy the holidays! I hope you have something lovely planned to mark the end of another year.

It’s holiday time! I do love December, even though the evenings are now so dark here. Perhaps that’s why it’s so special to be considering things to do to brighten up the mood. Last year was a bit of a wash out in terms of team celebration. We would have normally gone out, and we did nothing (along with the rest of the world). This year, while we’re still a virtual team working from home, perhaps we’ll have the opportunity to organise something a bit more fun. I’m thinking a virtual escape room? There are quite a few that have popped up over the past 12 months and the opportunity to do something together that isn’t work is quite appealing.

The infographic below shows some things to think about when you are planning festive celebrations for your team, if you intend to do something to mark the end of the year. Over here, we can take a Christmas theme, but if you don’t celebrate Christmas, think about how you can join in with the festivities relevant to you – or just celebrate getting through another 12 months!

My top tips are:

Plan early and get your booking in soon as many people this year will be attempting to organise something to make up for last year when teams weren’t able to get together in the same way.

Think beyond meals out: restaurants are one option but there are other things you could consider as a team, like an escape room, for example.

Send holiday cards to your team and supplier. I have digital templates every year that do the job – message me if you would like them.

Include the whole team. If someone on the team doesn’t feel ready to go out into the world yet and meet up in person, then I believe the team should adjust the celebrations to revolve around activities that everyone can do.

Know your tax: In the UK, there is a limit to what employers can spend on team gatherings for the holidays. Anything more than that and there is a personal liability involved for participants, and trust me, no one wants to get taxed on the “fun” office party. Talk to your manager or finance team if you think that’s an issue for you. In my experience, it tends to be a problem if there is a corporate event and you also want to do something as a project team, as that means some people are effectively attending two events.

Have fun! And best wishes for 2022 😊

Is it too early to be thinking about project team ideas for celebrating the end of the year? Probably not!

And don’t worry about not having anything to celebrate. You made it through another year – that’s enough! If you do have project deliverables or milestones that happen to time with the end of the year, even better, but don’t postpone having a party until you’ve got “something” to celebrate. Working hard all year is enough.

Here are some tips for ending 2019 on a high with your team.

1.Don’t leave it too late

Plan your end of year celebrations now, if you haven’t already started! Many people will be advanced with their planning, and they’ll be booking up the best restaurants and venues.

Also, it takes a while to search for places to go that suit your team and your budget. I remember last year’s Christmas team party for our PMO: we needed somewhere that could cater for vegetarian and gluten free, plus a colleague who was coming in from maternity leave and bringing small baby (and accompanying pram). And we needed it to be cost-effective as we were paying for ourselves. And we wanted to order in advance so we didn’t have ages to wait for the food, because we were on our lunch break! That also meant it had to be close enough to the office to get there and back in a reasonable amount of time.

I scouted out a few venues and found somewhere within our budget, but it took a while.

2.Think outside the restaurants

Over here in the UK, it’s traditional in many companies to have a meal at Christmas with your team. Whether that’s lunch or dinner is up to you. But it isn’t your only choice.

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, another festival, or just marking the passing of another year, food is not your only option for work events. We’ve been out to a comedy club, been sailing (although not something I would do at this time of year) and had a mini-sports day.

You could go to a skating rink, do an open top bus tour to see the lights or something else. Make it accessible. Make it fun!

3. Plan your holiday cards

If you haven’t already, start thinking about who is going to get a holiday card. As the project manager, it’s my responsibility to send cards to the suppliers and colleagues who have supported us through the year.

Ask your Marketing department if they have cards you can use.

You don’t actually need to send a physical card – a nice email with a seasonal picture is enough. Maybe your team could dress up in Santa hats and you take a photo?

4.Manage the team’s liability

Tax rules vary from place to place. Make sure your holiday party/meal and any gifts you give or receive don’t fall foul of local laws.

Here in the UK, my company is limited to annual staff entertaining events totalling £150 per head per year. I believe we could spend this on several different events, like a summer barbecue and a Christmas party, as long as that doesn’t go over. If we go over, we pay tax on the whole amount, and I think there is a liability for the employee as well.

Just be careful what you do, so that no employee ends up with an unexpected tax bill on the ‘benefit’ of having a meal with work colleagues. Check that any project or team event doesn’t conflict with whatever your company might be doing on an ‘all hands’ basis.

5.Have fun!

Whatever you do, try to make it fun. It’s often not fun for the person organising, because there’s the stress of hoping people have a good time, collecting money, being Secret Santa, organising payments and so on.

Perhaps split the work of organising your holiday celebration between the team, so that the burden doesn’t fall all on one person.

Take photographs! You’ll be glad you did when you look back at the end of the project and see what you managed to achieve, and the relationships you built on the way.

Pin for later reading:

An enterprise resource pool is a great way to track and manage the people available to work on projects. It’s often set up by the Project Management Office and used to work out who is going to be a good fit for the skill needs of a new project.

Setting one up doesn’t have to be a big job or particularly complex, and many project management software tools will do this for you. Dan Lefsky, speaking at the PMI Global Congress EMEA in Barcelona, talked about the things you need to include in your resource pool data set in order to get the most use out of it.

Categories of Resource

He explained that a resource pool includes two types of resources:

• Generic resources (these could actually be non-people resources like meeting rooms, although he didn’t cover those)
• Named resources (these are your potential project team members).

The Data Needed For Your Resource Pool

He gave examples of the 8 things you need to consider and record for each named resource in order for you to be able to usefully draw on the data to select team members for upcoming projects. These are:

1. The Type of Resource

Is the person a Business Analyst, a Project Manager, a Quality Analyst, a User Experience expert, a Tech Writer, a Developer? Or something else? This is typically their job title and doesn’t necessarily reflect their particular skills.

2. Skillset

This is where you record their skills. You’ll probably want to set up a drop down list or categories that you can tick from as searching free text fields is going to be too difficult once you’ve got all your resources on there. Skills can include programming languages, Agile/waterfall/hybrid PM methodologies and so on.

3. Experience

It’s worth noting the experience of each individual. This could include the departments they have worked on, the category of project they do, the number of years they have been at the company, or years’ experience overall in their role, the key relationships they have within informal networks etc.

4. Cost

Cost of resource is a factor. Are they charged at time and materials? Or fixed price? What’s their internal day rate when working on projects? You might not have costs for some resources because it’s moving ‘wooden dollars’ around the organisation and that’s fine, but if you intend to charge clients for resource time then you’ll need to know what each person costs.

5. Location

Where is the resource based? For some projects it might not matter because they can work virtually, but for others it might have a significant impact. You could categorise these, Lefsky said, by onsite, offshore, onshore, nearshore or remote. Or you could list the city where they work (or do both).

6. Maximum Availability

This could change depending on their other commitments but it’s definitely a useful piece of information to have for some resources. For example, where an individual also works as a team manager, they will have certain management responsibilities that take up some time. These are things, speaking from experience, like approving timesheets, managing team’s expenses, team-level reporting, 1-to-1 meetings and performance reviews, dealing with sickness absence and so on.

You can’t allocate these people to your project 100% of the time. In fact, it’s not sensible to allocate anyone to your project 100% of the time. Note down what time they have outside their normal responsibilities that can be allocated to project work.

7. Manager

Knowing their line manager is helpful for resource requests.

8. Resource Breakdown Structure

Lefsky talked about positioning resources in the Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS) as this lets you see their security permissions, areas of control and similar. If you have a formal RBS then this could be worth doing but if you don’t, you could just as easily create another categorisation for security clearance if that was important to you.

Gather all this information and start to populate your enterprise resource pool. When you get started you’ll probably just focus on the people who spend a lot of time working on projects, but it’s worth expanding this if you can, and if you are going to take an enterprise-wide view of portfolio management. It’s a big job, and you have to reconcile the fact of treating individuals as ‘resources’ who can be put into little boxes and categorised, instead of the unique individuals that they are, but in large organisations particularly it can be incredibly successful.

Note that you’re going to have to continually review this. While someone’s job title might not change that often they could gain new experience through projects or develop new skills after training. Don’t let your resource pool data get out of date or you won’t benefit from being able to develop individuals or from letting them use new skills.

Do you use a resource pool? Let us know in the comments if it has been successful for you or whether – as I suspect it might be in many companies – it was set up as a one-off exercise and then not developed further, thus falling out of use very quickly. I look forward to hearing your experiences!

I’m off to Barcelona very, very soon, to get ready for the PMI Global Congress EMEA which is happening next week.

Here are the 10 things I am most looking forward to.

1. Great Networking

I’ve already arranged lunch with someone I’ve ‘met’ here on ProjectManagement.com. The discussion forums and messaging tools on the site really do allow you to make new connections that go far further than a simple ‘follow’.

I’m looking forward to meeting her and to finding out more about her project management world.

2. Great Speakers

The PMI events attract some great speakers and while there aren’t a lot of names I recognise on the line up (I don’t think anyone could top seeing Colin Powell for me – regardless of your opinion of his politics he was a fantastic headliner at one North America Congress), I know that they have all gone through a rigorous process for being selected.

I know that because I did too. I’m looking forward to meeting my fellow panellists at the session I am delivering on Wednesday. We’re giving a panel debate on future trends in project management and collaboration tools, as well as talking about how to practically use them in your job.

3. A Break

One of the main reasons I go to conferences is to recharge my batteries. I know that sounds ironic, as I often spend longer at the conference venue, then typing up my notes afterwards, than I do in a normal working day.

Plus it’s brain intense a lot of the time – not just listening to new ideas, but also having to think about everything from where to go to lunch to how to change my session registrations. Normally a work day includes at least some time where I’m doing something that I do regularly and can therefore do without thinking.

4. Inspiration

A good conference should mean I come home with loads of interesting ideas but most importantly, inspiration of how I can grow as a professional.

5. Practical Tips

The carer and personal growth thing is all good, but what I also need are practical tips that I can use in my project management day job from the moment I get back to the office. I’ll be hoping to mix up my sessions so I see a few inspirational, big picture talks and a few practitioner-level speakers for those practical takeaways.

6. Reaffirming Existing Connections

Yes, I hope to catch up with some old project management buddies. In fact, I’ve arranged to share an apartment with one, to keep costs down, get a nicer place between us and spend some time catching up.

I’m also hoping that there will be other old friends, colleagues, and clients there whom I can meet. We all work around the world, so while I’ve known some of them for years I don’t often get a chance to see them in person.

7. Great Food

I’m actually not a huge fan of tapas because I find it is way too easy to eat far too much. I also struggle to keep to Spanish dinner times and the trips I’ve had to Spain before have seen me go out to eat much earlier than the locals.

Having said that, the food is good, and I remember wonderful fish dinners on the seafront in Barcelona from previous visits.

Plus, churros. Need I say more?

8. Great Coffee.

It’s Spain. Of course the coffee is good.

9. A Sense of Community

One of the best things about being with loads of other people who love managing projects as much as I do is that it’s very reassuring to hear that we all have the same issues. “Oh, you have problems with stakeholders too, do you?” “Yes, my testing phase was just as terrible.”

We all live with the same challenges and it’s good to know that you are not alone in having to deal with an uncooperative sponsor.

10. Seeing My Book!

Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, my new book, will debut at the PMI Bookstore on site in Barcelona. I can’t wait, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to help myself from taking photos of it and then putting them on my Facebook page.

Published by PMI, it’s a totally revised and updated version of Social Media for Project Managers, building on everything that book covered and bringing it right up to date.

I haven’t yet seen a copy in real life and I’m so excited to know that it’s going to be there.

If you are going, get in touch through the PMI Congress app and I’ll try to find you to say hi!