Project Workflow Optimisation for Holiday Season
Published: 02/08/2019
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This guide is designed for business owners and managing directors to prepare their organisations for the holiday season. In this article, we will discuss optimising project workflows. Specifically, how can you prepare your business for the period when most of your staff will be taking time off?
The holiday season means that you will be working with a smaller-than-usual team for at least a couple of weeks. Naturally, you cannot prevent your staff from taking time off to spend with their friends and family. Unfortunately, the dilemma you face is that this is the period when the majority of your employees take their holidays. This often results in difficulties in ensuring your business can meet deadlines and deliverables when the office is not fully staffed.
We recently read an intriguing article in Forbes on the topic. It explains: ‘To make up for the shortage, companies need to implement practices and strategies to ensure the flexibility and adaptability of the remaining team.’ The article shares several top tips from company leaders that will assist your agency in managing the summer holiday period and maintaining high productivity during months of being short-staffed. In other words, it discusses project workflow optimisation.
Project workflow optimisation involves analysing your workforce and resources to utilise them in a manner that maximises efficiency. It can also reduce costs, decrease the likelihood of errors, and minimise the time spent on tasks.
Ultimately, it encompasses an umbrella term for establishing workflows that yield the greatest advantage while utilising the fewest resources. Now, let us explore how you can initiate this process.
Start digging the well before you’re thirsty. There’s nothing worse for business than being caught unprepared by the holiday season. Not only does it impact the company's productivity, but it can also strain both internal and client relationships. This means you must start preparing for the holiday season in advance.
The best way to optimise project workflows when most of the staff are away is to discuss holiday schedules during project management meetings. This approach will ensure everyone is aware of who is off when, aiding in planning collaborations accordingly. Regularly addressing this topic will also help to prevent it from being easily forgotten.
You can also implement a time-off management system that every employee can access to see which team members are on holiday. This is particularly useful when unforeseen circumstances arise and decisions must be made swiftly without waiting for a project management meeting.
Does your organisation allow employees to leave early on Fridays? If so, consider implementing an ‘on-call’ system. Each week, one team member should be chosen to remain available in the afternoon to respond to urgent emails. This fosters a strong work-life balance while ensuring your agency remains attentive to your clients’ needs.
Just as this is effective on early-finish Fridays, it will also function throughout the holiday rush. The key idea is to always have at least one person available.
A foolproof way to maintain a healthy project workflow, even at reduced capacity, is to create complete visibility. By complete, we mean that while it’s crucial to do this internally, it also involves being transparent with your clients. We strongly recommend adopting a centralised cloud-based solution like Timesheet Portal to achieve both objectives.
Ensure your company holiday calendar is visible to your clients to avoid disappointment. This is an excellent way to manage expectations. Being notified well in advance that there may be discrepancies with project delivery can potentially preserve a relationship. There are numerous methods to do this, including creating a spreadsheet.
However, since you’re likely time-deprived, you can export data from holiday tracking software beforehand. This way, you only need to send it to your clients. It is a far more efficient method than creating a spreadsheet. Our Project edition allows you to send your holiday calendar directly to your client without leaving the platform. Indeed, you won’t even need to export it.
Integrating project management software with a time-off platform can establish a centralised, visual project workflow dashboard. Visible to the entire team, it provides a clear overview of deadlines and deliverables, facilitating more effective time management.
Assessing the workload and the available workforce is essential for successful project delivery. Centralising both of these metrics results in improved decision-making and increased efficiency.
You know you’re meant to be a virtuoso of communication. You’re right to apply this skill set in attracting new talent, but that’s not where you should concentrate your efforts. Instead, focus most of your energy on maintaining good relationships with your existing contractors. It’s far cheaper to retain current staff than to attract new hires.
Finally, as holiday requests begin to arrive, it’s easy to overlook a few or inadvertently allow more staff time off than your business can afford. You don’t want to find yourself in a position where an urgent issue arises, yet only two people in the office are available to handle it, and they are both away.
The best way to prevent such a situation is to adopt a system that provides complete visibility of the holiday calendar whenever a new time-off request is submitted. Based on the circumstances, you can swiftly approve or deny the request in a streamlined manner. Your employees will also appreciate receiving a response from you sooner than anticipated.
Although the holiday approval system isn’t the core of our software, it represents a significant part of it. Not only does it encompass what has been described above, but it also aids in automating tedious processes such as calculating holiday accruals.
Many businesses dread the holiday season as it often leads to being understaffed and overwhelmed with work. Disrupted project workflows can also result in client fallouts, diminished trust, or even lost revenue. However, it doesn’t need to be this way.
You need only consider the future and tackle it strategically. The best approach is equally straightforward: Ensure complete transparency for all parties involved.
Feeling anxious about the approaching holiday season? Speak to us; we can assist you.