Come the beginning of December, people seem to start to panic – clients, contractors and our project teams. It’s similar to the shops shutting for a day (which also happens at Christmas). Everyone is in the supermarket the day before stocking up on everything, just in case – and the shelves look so empty you might think that some sort of siege was about to happen and that we didn’t really expect the holiday shutdown to come and go every year.
In Australia, the Christmas holidays coincides with summer, and for us, this period becomes the main holiday period of the year. Most architecture, design and engineering companies will close down for at least two weeks, some for three. Construction contractors and manufacturers are usually closed for longer, although these days its pretty unusual for anyone to shut down for the whole of January, ten years ago that was pretty common in construction. However, into January many staff will remain on holidays, or come back to work for a couple of weeks prior to taking time off.
This emergency mentality starts to pervade the business and construction world from around the beginning of December (or earlier). Everyone starts thinking about all the things they feel must be completed prior to Christmas. By the time we get to the last week before Christmas, you would sometimes almost think that no work will ever be done again. That if its not done by Christmas it can’t be done. When you have a project currently under construction, due for completion in February, this panic always intensifies. Shop drawings have to be signed off, engineers out to site, all decisions made – by this Friday when we are all shutting down for our holidays. But the funny thing is – the site is going to shut down for the holiday too. So are all the manufacturer’s and suppliers. No one is working again till 6 January. So in actual fact, if something doesn’t get done by this Friday, what happens? Nothing! It just gets done on January 6. Yes, that’s 2 weeks away, but as everyone is closed anyway, there in no impact. Get that everyone? It’s almost like many people forgot to program the holiday period into the project timeline and only realised last week that Christmas was coming. During the 12 hours between writing the first draft of this post, I’ve even been invited to a tender interview – before Christmas of course!
If everyone is taking holidays, there is no delay over this shutdown time. Common sense, but a lot of people seem to forget that this time of year. Now of course if you are working on projects in other countries or with critical infrastructure perhaps you don’t have the luxury of a shutdown at all, and maybe you do have to achieve certain things prior to the shutdown. Otherwise, relax a bit – and maybe by 26th December you won’t feel like you need at least a month off! Sometimes I think we do just as much work in December as every other month of the year, we just squash it all into the first three weeks.
So enjoy your holidays if you do have them coming up at this time of year. This will be my last post for the year – and till February! I am taking the long Australian summer holiday, off to enjoy wintertime in Spain. I will be back next year – thanks for reading this year! I’m really enjoying writing this blog, having the chance to think, research and write about issues affecting our industry. The amount of comments and discussion often happening on Linkedin or here on the site is great. Just recently this blog hit the milestone of 100 subscribers which was very exciting. Keep reading and commenting, and keep sharing with your friends and colleagues!
PS. I’ve kept this post short this week, firstly I know you are probably all suffering from the pre holiday panic. Secondly and more importantly though – so you can read this article on I provided comment for – Avoid Poorly Administered Projects – in the ZwiegWhite Newsletter. I’ve linked the article here 1034-TZL. You can subscribe to ZweigWhite here (its a paid subscription).
Image Credits:
