A sneaky little tip for project managers is to try to move your project delivery times to be out of sync with the usual delivery patterns for your organisation.
Most projects tend to aim for the same delivery date, often tied to the end of a large corporation’s financial year, usually December. That seems sensible enough on paper, but in practice, it causes a predictable pain.
In today’s service-oriented infrastructures, where there’s a shared pool of resources, budgets, and dependencies, any delay in one project tends to ripple across the lot. As a result, all the deliveries bunch up at the same time. That’s fine; because as managers and architects we are paid to deal with that kind of thing, but what we often forget is that everyone else is paid to do the same thing at the same time.
The outcome? The last few months of any given financial year are pure mayhem. Every team wants extra time, extra effort, and extra support from all the shared support teams to push their project over the line. Everyone’s pulling on the same people and systems at once.
If I had my way and could get involved right at a project’s inception, I’d always try to schedule its delivery for a quieter time of year, when other projects aren’t all competing for the same shared effort. It’s a small adjustment that I find makes a huge difference to delivery quality, stress levels, and overall sanity in your teams.