Are you resourced and ready for 2019? The start of a fresh year means fresh perspectives on your IT strategy – do you need an Project Manager to revitalise your project, an infrastructure consultant to help with keep things moving, or a Service Delivery Manager to realign your 2019 goals? Often after the Christmas break it can be hard to get things moving at the pace you were before, but why?
- The Holiday Ramp up – Many people take leave over the Christmas/New Year break. When they do come back relaxed and refreshed, they’re not usually performing with optimal efficiency straight away. There’s usually the hundreds of emails to catch up on. The colleagues you might have missed. The stories to share. This all contributes to inactivity and can take weeks to regain that momentum again.
- Lack of Direction – For more complex projects, and without strong project management, it can be difficult to establish the next steps after returning from a break. What was the last task completed? Who has an action on them? What’s the next step? Once these co-ordination tasks are identified, several weeks could be lost.
- Dependency on other business processes – Perhaps your project team have all come back ready to hit the ground running but there is a dependency on another business process to move forward, for example a change approval board may not be resuming until several weeks into the new year
- Budget Changes – Depending on the financial calendar of the organisation, those controlling the purse strings may decree that project budgets need tightening before they can process in the new year. This requires careful review of the project scope while resources remain idle, losing precious days or weeks as the timeline is adjusted.
- Extended holidays – Some key resources in a project may choose to take an extended break. This means a project could have resource gaps and leave it dead in the water until the gaps are filled. Sometimes this leave is planned for and the impact is minimal, but it’s not uncommon for a project to drop back to idle until a resource is available again.
- Vendor availability – If project work or internal services are being provided by a third party, you may be at the mercy of their availability over the holiday period which may not line up with your schedules and obligations.
Starboard IT has a range of professionals that can help get you back on track for the year ahead, we provide the IT At Your Service program to allow you to dial up (or down) certain resources as and when you need. If you’re affected by any of the above symptoms of the post-new year break you don’t need to feel helpless – get in touch today and we’ll get you back on the right track.
If you’re looking for consultancy services to help design your own IT business processes, contact Starboard IT to find out what we can do for you.
