Holiday Time at Non-Profits

Holiday times must be madness for most, if not all, non-profits. It's also a time that many people are out of the office, exacerbating the madness. For IT, I find it a mixed bag. Usually when I hear that people are out of the office, I start planning for some major overhaul. I even try to take advantage of holiday parties if I can. The longer users are away from their PC, the more time I have to do network-wide projects during the day. In the past I have planned OS patching, hardware swapping, firmware upgrading, and rewiring around these golden moments of opportunity.

This time is also more harried, as fewer people need to suddenly do far more things than they ordinarily would. Different people have been assigned to check others' emails (and no one understands delegates in Outlook so forget it), perform data entry into programs not ordinarily on their workstation, or work remotely (just go on vacation, people!).

I've learned a couple of things in the last few years: 1) make staff tell you ahead of time how they plan to disburse their work when they are out. There is nothing worse then being approached on the day the person is leaving with the request to help solve their lack of availability. Threaten them if you have to but be careful. Brushing a person off as punishment for their procrastination means they'll just give someone their password. 2) Once a project is planned, don't let anything stop you from doing that project on schedule. Opportunities where most staff are away from their workstations don't come often. Yeah, I'd rather be at the holiday party but I'm a one-man IT operation and this is my chance.

Have a great Holiday Season, everyone!