How Project Management Saved Christmas

As you could imagine, this time of year sends Santa’s workshop into chaos, and with the extra precautions he’s had to take on to survive and thrive in the ‘new normal’, he’s had to juggle a few extra things. With so many tasks on the go, what can Santa do to make sure Christmas goes off without a hitch?

Provide greater transparency

With elves, Reindeer and other helpers rotating in and out of the workshop, it can be difficult to understand and track the progress of toy production and sleigh preparation. Without knowing who’s got the ball, key milestones can slip through the cracks and derail the whole process.

The solution to this is greater project transparency. Excel documents and other project management tools often make it difficult to gain a quick overview of project progression, or they don’t give enough insight into the details, making it hard to understand where delays are being caused. With edison365projects, Santa's helpers gain visibility of all projects in one place, allowing them to quickly view projects not started, in progress and complete. With personal profiles linked to Microsoft Delve, there is also no confusion around who is responsible for what project or activity.

Use suitable templates

There’s no one size fits all plan for project management. Building a new sleigh requires completely different input compared to making the workshop COVID secure for all the elves to work safely. If Santa tried to use the same template for both, he’d possibly leave out crucial information that’s key to the project’s success or it could contain too complex and unnecessary information for certain teams to understand.

Using edison365projects, Santa can build customizable templates to suit the needs of the workshop. Not only will this make it easier for the elves and reindeer to understand what they’re doing, and capture the necessary data for project success, the workshop can now benefit from standardization and governance, ensuring that the same type of projects can be easily replicated in the future.

Make collaboration easy

Since many of Santa’s helpers have been working remotely, the elves around the workshop have been using Microsoft 365 to collaborate on toy designs, production and route planning. The things they discuss on Teams and Yammer are crucial for Christmas to go off without a hitch. Without effective collaboration it can be hard to understand who’s working on each activity and what the next step is.

Effective collaboration comes from easy communication methods. Integrating your project management process with your existing collaboration tools makes collaboration simple. With edison365projects, projects can be linked to a Teams Channel, and can be viewed and edited all from there. The elves can also benefit from a centralized place to store all documents relating to the project, making it easier to collaborate with each other outside of the workshop.

With these changes to the workshop’s project management process, Santa will see an increase in productivity and be able to drive change more effectively. Learn more about Santa’s project management tool of choice here.