Project Management

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How to manage public holiday when making a schedule in global environment

linkedin twitter facebook   Organizational Project Management   Resource Management   Scheduling   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  
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sandeep Kharbanda Sales manager| Vanderlande Industries Pune, Maharashtra, India
For example :
In European counties : there is one week holiday during Christmas and new year
In south Asian counties : there is week holiday during Chinese New Year or lunar year.
In india : in a year there are many festival relative to states where resources are available.
Etc.

Customer always expect a project plan inclusive of public holiday in their home country,

As a global organisation, we may have resources from many countries , means there productivity may effect by the public holiday in their countries.What is the best way to manage project schedule.
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Productivity is not impacted. The problem is the missunderstanding about the meaning of productivity. Is the same when most of the project managers consider 8 hours work day when it is not true because people normally works 6 hours per day or not consider the time window (for example South America countries vs India). The last really impact productivity. So, what I do from years (I am working with more than 65 countries around the world) is put the real calendar for each country in my project calendar and create the schedule. After the first schedule is created is time to take into account project assumptions and constraints to work on it if apply (and unfortunatelly ever applies).
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1 reply by sandeep Kharbanda
Mar 20, 2016 2:06 AM
sandeep Kharbanda
...
Mr. Ajam , rightly said, productivity is not impacted.
How do we correlate this project milestone, most of time we have delivery of milestone in Project / client home country on the dates which are directly affected by the public holiday in resource country.
In those cases the project manager have challenges to crash the activity to delivery earlier than key milestone date which is not always feasible.
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Anonymous
What Sergio said :)

Agree with him on the point of productivity - which it has nothing to do with Calendar.

The main scheduling tools allow you to create special calendars based on your resources and a project schedule. So whether it is holidays or vacation time, once you enter it into the tool, the tool will adjust accordingly.

Then you have to check the tool.

Here is a simple example. If you have a task that takes two days and start on Thursday when will it finish? In many countries with Moslem heritage they might have Fri-Sat as the weekend therefore for them the task will finish on Sunday. In countries observing Sat-Sun weekend the task will finish on Friday.

Again, the key is to take the time and upload your resources calendar in the tool.
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Ahmed Fouad Sedky Senior Claims Consultant | Systech Canada Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hi,
With out getting into the productivity details. Most of the scheduling software allows you to define different calendars. Your WBS usually include the works to be done in different location under different WBS bands and you have separate activities for these activities.
So now you can ask the performing organization about there working calender and the public holidays and reflect each stakeholder calender on the related activity. This way the working days are taken into consideration.
So to recap the above
1-Break down the activities based on the performing organization and location.
2- Ask each performing organization in each location about their working calendars.
3-Assign each Calendar to the related activity.
Now your schedule takes into consideration these factors.
I have been working for many years in similar situation environment and this way worked very well.
Cheers,
Ahmed
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sandeep Kharbanda Sales manager| Vanderlande Industries Pune, Maharashtra, India
Mar 16, 2016 6:50 AM
Replying to Sergio Luis Conte
...
Productivity is not impacted. The problem is the missunderstanding about the meaning of productivity. Is the same when most of the project managers consider 8 hours work day when it is not true because people normally works 6 hours per day or not consider the time window (for example South America countries vs India). The last really impact productivity. So, what I do from years (I am working with more than 65 countries around the world) is put the real calendar for each country in my project calendar and create the schedule. After the first schedule is created is time to take into account project assumptions and constraints to work on it if apply (and unfortunatelly ever applies).
Mr. Ajam , rightly said, productivity is not impacted.
How do we correlate this project milestone, most of time we have delivery of milestone in Project / client home country on the dates which are directly affected by the public holiday in resource country.
In those cases the project manager have challenges to crash the activity to delivery earlier than key milestone date which is not always feasible.
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Harish Ranganatha PgMP coach and Program Manager Consultant| ACEPRO Bangalore, Kar., India
We define project calender, which shows what all the days the project is going to work. Resources will have resource specific calendar. So when we have these two, the scheduling is adjusted by tools accordingly.

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