New Year and project management

Hub "Project Management" - one of the most popular on Habré. And the reasons for that are simple - the topic is really big, interesting and constantly evolving.

However, in this Friday post we would like to look at this topic from a slightly different angle.
The fact is that the most famous and massive deadline in the world is the New Year. Only everyone is preparing for it long before its onset, anticipating fun and joy, a meeting with loved ones, gifts, fireworks and other buns.
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All of us have this pleasant feeling, when there is only a couple of hours until the new year, and not all salads are cut, the apartment is not completely cleaned up and we still need to take a shower and stroke the shirt to celebrate the new year "when dressed". A timer is ticking in my head, which very soon is “visualized” in the Kremlin chimes, whose fight cannot be stopped.

Let's try to extract the “New Year” from this social phenomenon to the maximum and apply the skills it gives in project management.

1. New Year can not be transferred "a week later . " Yes, designer Petya flew off on vacation, the formatter drove the grandmother to Orel, and the project manager does not know how to finish the project on time.

Now imagine that every deadline in your company is the same as the New Year. It can not be transferred. And if such a feeling is “inculcated” to the whole team (and in this case, the comparison with the New Year will be clear to everyone), and living with a hard deadline for the project, each of its members will understand that if they “make a cap” their site, then found another person who can, because "transfer for a week" will not work and the project manager will be forced to use "Plan B".

When customers (or customers of a project within an organization) see that your company (or your department) meets deadlines - your status will increase significantly in their eyes! Because in Russia, unfortunately, this is still an exception, rather than the rule. To celebrate the New Year on time is more or less able, but to do their job on time is not very.

2. New Year - a feeling of celebration . We all remember this slight disappointment that you are preparing so much for this holiday, and now the chimes are punched, the champagne is drunk, and the feeling that you are already in the New Year is gone. We, the adherents of scientific atheism to the habras-residents, of course, it is clear that this holiday is artificial and there is no special gland in the human body, which is responsible for producing individual endorphins at the moment when it hits twelve chimes.

But, in contrast to the New Year, the project made is able to bring that very joy from a good (or at least in time) work done. This idea can also be conveyed to the project team (especially to those who send demotivators about the fact that Christmas toys seem to be the same as in childhood, and the joy in them is not the same).

3. New Year is, by definition, a collective holiday . It is impossible to meet him alone (well, or perhaps, but only in order to properly “feel” his loneliness). And the coordinated joint actions of those who take part in the holiday (someone buys a Christmas tree, someone cleans up in the apartment, someone cuts salads, someone goes shopping ...) everything depends on whether everything will be ready for the New Year or not.

Most projects are collective, with parallel or sequential tasks. It depends on the quality of the designer’s work whether the coder can make his site on time and transfer everything to the programmer (if, for example, we are talking about a site creation project). And so on. During trainings in your team, ask: “Is it possible that if your mother succeeds in organizing a holiday for the New Year and does everything on time, then it will not work for you?”.

4. There is a good rule - meet the New Year with a light heart . Those. with paid debts, deeds done in trifles, with friends and relatives who do not hide offense or anger against you. The ideology is simple - since you transfer all this “load” into the next year, all these problems will only accumulate. But it is necessary to free up space for health, personal life, new ideas and desires that we would like to realize in the New Year.

In project management, this New Year rule is also very adviseable to postpone. After a project is submitted, there should be no unpaid debts with contractors, if someone from the team had to be “pressured”, after the project was submitted, it is worth going with this person to drink beer and defuse the situation, to communicate like a human being so that the next project will not “ broke through. " If you have some desire to change something inside, then immediately after the project it is better to do everything possible to realize this desire. Whether it is the idea to transfer project management to BaseCamp or the desire to take on an internship of a new layout designer - after all, in the next New Year Project this weak point may “break through”.

Or, if you realized that the work on the fact turned out to be more, then it's time to talk with the customer about the fact that the next project will be done either in more time or for a greater cost.

5. “The New Year is a big pile of food and alcohol!” - let's be honest with ourselves, on the physiological level this holiday is perceived in this way. The tradition of setting the table that breaks from food is a pagan custom that cannot be broken. It goes back to the desire to appease the gods and to ask them to be fertile all next year.

Supporters of a healthy lifestyle, New Year's Eve with an asparagus salad, of course, look at this pile of food with some disgust. The rest are stocked with "Mezim" and anticipate the feast of the abdomen. However, for those and for others, the presence of this tradition is rather a plus than a minus. It allows you to “exhale”, relax and “release” the old (past) year with all its sorrows and joys, and turn your gaze to the future.

Of course, this magic feature of the “abundant table” should be used in project management. Do not save, put in the project budget money for a banquet (dinner) for the team that implemented it. Even if it is a pizza bowling. Only through personal communication in an informal setting can you identify those problems that you may not have suspected.

If you can secure a stable reflex with your team (you completed the project on time - get your foie gras with a glass of red and pleasant live music), then you can safely rely on doggy (in the good sense of the word) dedication.

6. New Year - time to think about the future . Everything at least once in his life made a promise after the new year to stop drinking / smoking / playing DOTa (underline the appropriate). This is a kind of “threshold” that separates the previous life from the new.

And this property of the New Year must also be used in project management. That short time, when the old project is completed, and the new one has not yet begun - a great time to check with your strategic goals and understand whether you are moving correctly or have gone astray.

We hope that this post will help you look at the holiday / projects a little differently and make your life even more interesting!
And yes, With the coming of you! :)