Callenges of Managing Projects during End-of-Year Break

George,

Our development team is offshore, so from a dev perspective, activities continue as normal, though, there are other holiday's throughout the year that we track and add to the calendar.

From a SH perspective, yes, lots of planned vacations, and ad-hoc vacations to use those last remaining PTO days - like me! We certainly plan for these. I only have one ongoing project at the moment which goes to UAT the week b/t Xmas and the New Year.

Now, all that said, we have a change freeze from December through early January. This means no production changes (special cases aside). So we start planning in Q3 to ensure our timelines match up with this and that all SH's are aware. Many project requests come in late in the year requesting for a Q4 release (to have it for the new year), but b/c of the reduced window from the change freeze, many times there simply is not enough time/capacity to complete these requests.

And of course, I always wish those I'm working with a happy holiday season.

Thought provoking question, Agree with with Rami, lots of absence from site at this point of time and always have risk of delays, site theft or security breacches and result in delays and overruns in term of cost and schedule

I work for the U. S. federal government, so the time between December 10th through the first week after the new year is when people take their 'use or lose' leave. Projects predictably slow down because with each passing day more people are out of the office. I don't regard this as a risk; I just extend the duration of tasks occurring during this time.
As for holiday greetings, I don't email them to my teams as a group. Some senior managers send a holiday email to everyone in the organization, they usually strike me as pro forma and insincere. I interact with my teams enough that I can wish them holiday greetings via IM, phone call or in person. This feels more authentic to me than sending a mass email.

George -

For companies which offset their fiscal year ends from the calendar year end, there is usually a recognition that planning milestones in the weeks leading up to Xmas & New Year is not a good idea.

However, when a company's fiscal year and calendar year end are the same, the challenge with traditional annual planning cycles could be that funding is yanked if not used by year end.

In such cases, there can be a mad dash to get work done by December 31 which runs into the reality of resource shortfalls as in many companies they have a "use it or lose it" policy for vacation time as well as annual project funding!

Kiron