Are you gearing up for the holidays? There’s a lot to do as we count down to the end of the year! For me in the UK, it’s a Christmas break that I’m looking forward to, but the tips below work for whatever festivity or holiday project planning you are gearing up for as a team.
Are you gearing up for the holidays? There’s a lot to do as we count down to the end of the year! For me in the UK, it’s a Christmas break that I’m looking forward to, but the tips below work for whatever festivity or holiday project planning you are gearing up for as a team.
I’ve been caught out a couple of times (change freeze, anyone?) so in this article I’m sharing my tips for how to manage your work over the festive season.
Christmas creates a temporary change to the operating environment of your project.
People are away. Decisions take longer. Financial deadlines move forward. Steering meetings may need rescheduling. Suppliers may have reduced capacity. And the people who normally know how to resolve an issue might be sitting around a log fire somewhere.
Some proactive planning upfront will make it a lot easier for you to switch off properly when you down tools for the break.
Here’s my main tip for managing projects in the festive season. Before December, check:
In context
- Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
- Source: Rebel's Guide to PM
- Published: 05/10/2026
Continue reading at the original source →
Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
In project management, nearly everything discussed as a technical problem is really a problem of expectations badly negotiated at the start. Scope, time and cost were agreed at a moment when nobody had enough information, and afterwards nobody wanted to reopen the conversation.
I read these things looking for where the risk sat before it became an incident. It was almost always already written in some register nobody reviewed, with an assigned owner who never found out they were one. A risk identified and not managed is worse than one never identified: it creates the false sense that there is control.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is treating risk management as a deliverable of the planning phase. The matrix gets built, approved, filed. Nobody opens it again until closure, when it serves to document that the risk was foreseen — which is exactly the opposite of managing it.
What to watch
- Which risks are identified, who owns each one, and when they were last reviewed.
- The size of the first useful delivery: the further out it is, the more it resembles a bet.
- How it was estimated and how close the same organisation's previous estimates turned out to be.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is by shrinking the size of the deliveries. An eighteen-month project with nothing visible before month twelve is a bet, not a plan. I would rather have six deliveries that stand on their own, even if the total takes a little longer, because each one corrects the course.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
