Are you still at work while your colleagues are off on vacation? The holiday period – whether that’s during the summer, during the end of year or at any other point where it’s normal for people in your country to take time off – can see your project coming to a halt. Everything takes longer if you can’t find the resources and get responses to queries.
Here’s how to stop your project slowing right down during the quiet times.
Plan for vacations
Make sure you know when people on your project team are going to be away. Talk to everyone at the beginning of the project and check when they have plans to take vacations. As the project manager, you may not be able to approve or reject their leave requests (the line manager will do this) but you can at least be made aware of them.
Put those dates on your project schedule. Review the tasks scheduled for when you know when team members are going to be away, and make any amendments to your resource allocation plans to enable work to continue during these times.
Set expectations for those on leave
If any of your key resources have had leave approved, make sure that they know what they have to complete before they go away. If this work isn’t done, the knock on implication for the team can be significant: their lack of delivery could mean critical tasks cannot be worked on.
Before they go away, schedule a full handover to someone else on the team to ensure that they don’t leave anything unanswered and that you are happy with what they have done. Get as much documented as you can before they go.
Set expectations for those working
Make sure that the people left behind know that you expect the project work to continue. Set clear objectives about what is required during the slow period and also how you expect that to be achieved. Bring in any temporary members of staff required to get you through this time and ensure that they have also had a full handover before they pick up their responsibilities.
Deal with concerns
Your project team would be right to be concerned that they might not be able to make much progress. With key resources out of the office and off the project for several weeks how are you supposed to move anything forward? What if the people providing temporary cover are no good? Hopefully your forward planning would have predicted this and you should be able to put their minds at rest. Work on the tasks that you can with the resources you have available.
Make it easy
When everyone else is away and having fun, being stuck in the office can seem like you have drawn the short straw. It’s no fun to be at your desk when someone emails through pictures of themselves having cocktails by the pool or skiing a black run.
If you think this might affect morale for the team members who are at work, make it easy for them to be flexible. Offer to let them work from home if this is a practical option. Try to make it fun for those who have to trek into the office every day.
Having said that, remember that your project team is paid to do a job. Individuals know that work isn’t always the best place to be and they need to be professional. There’s a fine balance between making it easy for people to work from home and creating a fun, laid back atmosphere when it’s holiday season (like casual dress, for example) and slacking. Remember that you still have a project to complete!
Monitor progress
Keep on top of the project work as you would do normally. It should be easy enough to see when work isn’t progressing to plan and you can step in and do something about it. Your normal project tracking methods still apply, even if you are working with a skeleton staff and maybe some temporary resource!
Of course, you might want your project to run down a notch during the vacation time. Maybe everyone needs a slower pace during the heat or simply because they have been working flat out and deserve to go back to a ‘normal’ delivery schedule. If this is the case then the summer and end of year vacation times can be good times to help your team rebalance and restore morale. Just make sure that they all know when you expect to be picking up the pace again!