10 days of Christmas

This is a seasonal blog but not a cheesy play on the 12 days of Christmas song. More practical from this morning there are 10 working days left until Christmas (or 9 if you are not working Christmas Eve) so it’s time to prioritise. The MoSCoW prioritisation technique which is part of Agile Project Management is helping me take control as I have more work than there are days left!

Must haves

Anything that has to be completed by the end of the month. As 31st December is the end of the financial year for many firms, submitting expenses, completing reports of actual versus budget spend are all essential. Go back through your calendar and your emails to make sure there are no outstanding items or things you have been meaning to do when you have some ‘spare time’. That pretence is now over, there is no more spare time between now and next year so get things finished!

Should haves

What agreements and decisions can you finalise now so that you can implement them in early January? To ensure the new year kicks off with lots of progress and achievement, put everything in place now. For example, agree dates of workshops, get the venues booked, send out schedules of events to your stakeholders for January and February. January is three weeks away but when you come back from your holidays any meetings, presentations, workshops and walk-throughs not booked now will be delayed as you will need to give your stakeholders some notice. So this creates a hiatus until mid to late January which leads to project delays.

Could haves

All activities that are helpful in building strong stakeholder relationships. Sending out updates, listing achievements for the year, thanking stakeholders for their contributions. Reviewing plans to find things that need to be added for next year and identifying tasks that are no longer necessary as the world has moved on and what we’re good ideas at the start of a project are no longer necessary. If you have anytime spare, go back and re-do your stakeholder analysis to see if you are talking to all the right people. Things evolve and just like agile plans, you may need to add or subtract people from your project communications.

…and the rest

Going through your Must, Should and Could lists above will almost certainly take you through the last 10 days before Christmas. If by any chance you do complete them all then you deserve a well earned rest — I know I will.

Merry Christmas