How Does Santa Claus Plan his Schedule?

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Have you ever thought about how does Santa get everywhere on time? We can share his secret! Santa's Corp. agreed to present its use case, as in the opinion of the CEO Santa Claus, every organization, even a magic one, needs proper time management!

Once upon a time, long, long ago... Santa almost missed the deadline and was very upset, because billions of children waited for him with great hope. After the SWOT analysis, created by his secretary, Santa knew, that Grinch was not the main risk for Christmas. The core problem was in bad planning and task scheduling without proper reporting! Santa wasn't surprised as he managed a lot of teams and his area of responsibility was enormously large, even a Wizard of his level couldn’t cope with all of those challenges.

After a year of search, Santa finally discovered the best resource planning and team management tool for himself, he started using ActivityTimeline for Jira! Santa’s Corp. agreed to present its use case, as in the opinion of the CEO Santa Claus, the app suits every team with various needs.

Santa’s Resource Planning: Even (certainly) Deers and Elves should be Managed!

Maybe for someone, it sounds funny, but Santa is overwhelmed with planning activities for his teams. After a short consultation with the Senior Manager, he decided to divide the sphere of responsibilities into 7 continents which equal projects. These “projects” contain a set of tasks to be scheduled on the Main Dashboard which visualizes the workflow.

Santa adores that he can observe an actual workload of all teams, which are quite peculiar: elves from the mailing, presents production&delivery departments, dispatching team, security (to reinsure with the Grinch), and the most problematic unit - reindeers, who obey only Santa Claus and don’t recognize the proper time management:

A big scope of planning is crucial for Santa, that’s why he mostly uses a mode that shows teams with members and chooses between weeks/months/years scopes. A milestones panel helps not to miss essential deadlines:

Using Skills, Positions, and Events - Everything is Like People

The Senior manager took care of the proper position naming because there is a clear hierarchy in Santa’s corporation.

Another feature that really helps to create the right teams is a skills assignment. It helps to form a specific team for the specific type of work, e.g. if a child wants a wooden world map, the team should be formed of pro of wood carving, painter, and probably geographer. If the child needs a set of the best games for the Sony PlayStation, we need an advanced game player to pick up the right ones. If someone wants the unrealized album of Taylor Swift, the Manager will find a “gets - everything - from - everywhere” elf:

Elves and deers also have different occasions, they need sick leaves or vacations (but not during the high season), flights to partners, meetings and day-offs, or even team-buildings:

Personal Workspace for Everyone is no Longer a Fairy Tale!

Trade unions together with the animal protection organizations are completely satisfied, as ActivityTimeline provides personal cabinets for both elves and reindeers! They can find only personal tasks, track their own workload in order not to become overloaded, observe the worked time, and save personal notes:

Reporting - a key Factor of Success

As Santa’s Corp. is a big structure with the long - term objectives, every step must be reported for the benefit of children, employees, and administration. Santa chooses the most useful report in ActivityTimeline - Resource Workload Report, which helps him to track under- or overload:

Santa has been successfully delivering gifts for 4 years and has never missed deadlines with the help of ActivityTimeline. He's in love with his job and successfully shares joy around the world, but Santa knows that it won’t be possible without his assistants, so he provides the best working conditions for his subordinates. 

Check out our Blog page and discover more useful tips for your advanced planning.

[Soumyadeep Mandal]

Wow! That's cool!

Thanks for sharing! 😃

[Marshall Walker Lee]

More of this!