Father Christmas Takes Action

”Dear Father Christmas,

Are you kidding me? Maybe you should have noticed that on March 28th Easter is about to start. How do you think this will work out? Should we just cancel Easter? Or maybe celebrate it 3 months later?

You mustn’t delay Christmas. Under no circumstances. I don’t care how you are going to manage it. But bring things to order!

Respectfully,

The Easter Bunny“

”Oh my – what did I do?“ Father Christmas asked himself. ”Everyone is mad at me, all the people, the Easter Bunny, the industry. I never would have thought that my idea would lead to such serious consequences. I have to act now. Christmas has to take place as usual. Maybe I should ask my elves for help.”

Father Christmas takes immediate action. He calls all his elves to a crisis meeting.

“Dear employees and helpers.

The idea to delay Christmas in America led to a lot of negative consequences. Thus we have to meet the date for Christmas. After we experienced problems in previous years, we made some new arrangements. Only with enormous effort, due to overtime and significantly increasing costs, were we able to meet the deadline.

Although we already took appropriate action this year, we are delayed.

Now it is on us to save Christmas!”

But how exactly does it look like? 120,000 reindeers were flying for Father Christmas last year. Every single employee helped wherever he could and a lot of work was in progress at the same time. But that clearly wasn’t enough. That’s why Father Christmas made a new plan for 2013:

• Start early: Up until now work commenced in August. The supermarkets were selling sweets for Christmas and the gifts industry started advertising in September at the latest.

Father Christmas started working on projects in May, straight after his holidays.

• In addition Father Christmas employed more project managers. Skilled managers who were very successful in helping companies to finish their projects on time. Nothing can go wrong with such highly qualified managers – Father Christmas was sure about that.
• Every single employee and external helper was told to keep to all deadlines as projects would have not been completed on time otherwise. Delays were to be avoided under any circumstances. High contract penalties were set and the consequences for the one responsible would be devastating. Everyone was made even more responsible for the success of projects this year than they were the years before. That would work out for sure. Father Christmas had no doubt about it.
• Last but not least the budget was smaller. The exploding costs of the last years weren’t sustainable any more. Father Christmas didn’t want to ruin himself.

This is how everything will work out. Father Christmas was sure about that.

“The well planned multi project management, which we had made up for this year, doesn’t seem to work out. Our WorkInProgress is higher than ever, each of us avoids delays and everyone gets help if needed thanks to our perfect multitasking abilities. Reliability is our top priority, and due to the earlier start of the projects we should be on schedule.

But even though we give our best, are working day and night and are available for every single project, we are in this dilemma.

This situation in which we find ourselves can’t be changed now. But I firmly believe that there is still the chance to finish all projects on schedule, because we have no other choice than to save Christmas.

Therefore, I suggest to skip the weekends, increase the daily working time to 20 hours, and anyone who is not a 100% involved in a project will spend the rest of the time helping with a different project.

This is the only way, we are able to save Christmas!”

Pleased with himself Father Christmas sits down and waits for thunderous applause.

Instead, a general murmur ends the silence.

“When will we have time to eat and sleep?”

“Who will be taking care of my kids?”

“How do you want to pay for overtime?”

You can tell the elves aren’t pleased. They protest and call out on strike. External helpers want to quit their contracts.
Ever though Father Christmas doesn’t have the faintest idea how to save Christmas, he dares to stand up again:

“We have to take action.
Let’s see if we can solve the problem together.”

What can we do?”