Blackout Periods and Quiet Times: Planning Ahead for a Smooth Transition

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our between season episodes of Special Topics. This week, since it is Thanksgiving week, we are going to do some essentially holiday related topics. This episode, I want to talk about two things, blackout periods or quiet periods and looking at it from both sides. The first one, the more important side is dealing with customers, vendors, whoever it is that you need to that actually has a blackout period or quiet period. A real good example that I've run into and had discussions about in the past would be things like the Apple Store, Google Play, some of those kind of places where you have these vendors or these services that provide you a platform to release software or products. They tend to get one, really overwhelmed during certain times of the year, like towards the end of the year, the holiday period. And also, they have a lot of times they have a quiet period. They have a period where they say, we're not going to vet products or vendors for a week or two, something like that. Apple does that every year. a cutoff date that essentially says, if you want your product to appear by January 1st, then you need to have it submitted by some date well before it, typically around the end of the first or second week of December. And even when they do, I don't know that they necessarily have a quiet period or actually stop processing. But there is so much traffic, there are so many submissions that they just, they end up getting overwhelmed and it extends the normal time period. So for example, one of the things a lot of people like to do is start a new year with a podcast of some sort. Great thing to do, highly recommend it. However, if you want to be ready to go in the Apple store or whatever, for Apple podcasts on January 1, you really need to be in a situation where you've got that thing ready to go and submit it by the end of November. It varies from year to year, but you need to be thinking ahead and make sure that you get all your T's crossed and your I's dotted, all your paperwork submitted, everything in place for that January 1 launch. And they're by far not the only system that does that. If you want to launch a business, if that's something that you're thinking about for 2021 as we go into the new year, then take a look at what you need to have on day one in order to be effective. Do you need to have a website that exists? Is it something that you could create or is it something you need to find somebody, hire them and give them time to create the website? Even if there's something smaller, like let's say it's something where you are building your own website. However, you have to worry about things like making sure you get your SSL certificate set up and that the DNS has time for that to propagate. If you're on a server like maybe Amazon or actually any hosting company, it's not uncommon for you initially to take a little bit of time for the site to be brought up. And there's usually some paperwork and some sign-off you need to do to make sure that you're, for example, like billing and stuff like that flows. If you're going to do any kinds of e-commerce, that tends to take a little bit longer to make sure that you're properly signed up and registered to actually take orders or at least to be able to process orders. Usually there's some sort of bank connection there because they've got to verify your account. They often do test deposits, can take a couple of days for it to show up and then you have to follow that up. In most cases, it may take a day or two to get it done, but if you're doing this during holiday time, that can be very complicated. You may have people that you need to have involved in that process and they're not available. They're taking a couple of days or a week off or on vacation or something like that. So we need to be aware of blackout periods and quiet times and stuff like that that these companies will do so that we can coordinate as we need to so that we make sure we get things done on time so that we don't get bit by that period. In a similar situation, whoever you work for, whether you're an employee or as a contractor, consultant or something like that, you need to be aware of what the company arrangement is or what your customers do in these situations. From an employee point of view, it may not be as big a deal. You may just say, oh, hey, I've got some holiday time coming up. But it's always worthwhile to know what's coming up because you may be in a situation where you've got a couple of days of holiday and it only requires you to add one or two vacation days. The next thing you know, you've spun that into over a week off or something like that. That's highly recommended. I used to do that many, many years ago. Everything fell into place. It was one year where New Year, I can't remember what date they fell on or day of the week, but Christmas and New Year's fell so that I could take four days off on top of the holiday stuff I had. I got 15 days that I didn't have to work. I got to take a long break for essentially a very low cost on my days off, my PTO. Take a look at that kind of stuff. Don't be afraid to plan and extend some of your time off where possible. It may be a real good use of your normal PTO days. On the flip side of that is the idea of being someone that has a quiet period. When you do this, if you're doing it either as a service provider or products of any kind, a company where you've got customers that will be potentially impacted, you need to be notifying them. Put out notifications, let them know what the plan is well in advance. A lot of places there's sprints. If you're going through Scrum, you're using the Agile approach and you've got sprints, how those fall may be impacted. You want to consider the idea of maybe that last sprint of the year, you're going to give it one extra week maybe and then take a couple of weeks off. Or maybe you're going to cut it a little short. Or maybe you're going to go to instead of one big sprint with a couple of weeks left over, you cut it in half and do two smaller sprints or something. You want to think about that so that you ideally, particularly with sprints, you've got to watch out because you're going to have that week of Thanksgiving, which typically you lose a lot of resources for at least a couple of days. And then the week between Christmas and New Year's, you typically lose pretty much almost a full week for a lot of your resources because there's so many days off in there. So you want to think about that as you go into your planning and particularly release planning and things like that so that you're giving everybody heads up. And particularly if you do something where you're, some places, and I know I'm bouncing around a little bit here, but some places it's better for them to do maybe a big rollout or big upgrade during the holiday period because that's their slow time. Of course, other people, they would never consider that because that's their prime time. But however that works for you, make sure that you've given people enough heads up and that you're in a situation, particularly if you're going to try to do a rollout over the holidays. New Year's Eve, you want to roll out some new software. You need to make sure that you've got people committed to be there or adjust holiday schedules or whatever to say, hey, if you want time off, you have to, there's only so many slots and you have to have it in by such and such a time. Let people know so that they can arrange accordingly. Now, most, in a lot of cases, you're going to find that people will adjust. There will be maybe some complaints and stuff like that. But as long as you give them the information, if you wait till the last minute, if it's December 15th and you say, oh, by the way, we're shutting everything down from December 19th until January 1, you're not giving people a lot of time to work through stuff. So be aware of that. And this, like I said, it works both ways. You need to consider really for yourself, for your company, for your organization, that things will likely slow down. You're going to have people taking days off and you're going to have people winding down and ramping up. And they're just, honestly, they're probably not going to be necessarily as focused across the board as normal. So take that into account when you're planning what it is you want to accomplish. Likewise, if you have services you rely on, even the mail system, things like that, where you know they're going to be busier. They may not have the same staffing both ways. They may have less staff available than normal. Or they may staff up over a holiday period, but you end up with a lot of new staff, less experienced staff. So there's challenges involved there as well. So be aware of that. You have to plan a little bit more ahead as we go into this part of the year. That being said, I don't think anybody has to, we do this every year. It's not like you have to worry that the world's coming to an end or anything like that. But particularly because we talk about doing big things or changing gears as we go into the new year, that's part of what we're going to talk about this week is our planning and setting ourselves in a position so that we're ready to hit the ground running as we start the new year. We need to be a little ahead of that game so we have the things in place that will allow us to hit the ground running. If we wait till January 1st to start work on that new project, there's probably going to be things that are going to be delayed because you've got to go find the vendor and get the one that they've got to come back online or back to work. Then of course, there are always going to be a little bit of a backlog. January tends to be busy for, there's a lot of industries where it's going to be very busy because you have either a bunch of people with new year's resolutions that impact that industry or maybe you have a lot of returns that are coming in from the holidays that are being processed or there's a lot of different reasons that you'll see that seasonal spike essentially of going into a new year. Think about it, if you're doing anything big, think about the vendors that are involved in it. Actually, it doesn't even have to be that big, but if you have some plans coming up, think about the vendors involved and step it up a little bit, get things done a little sooner. It's just like that last minute Christmas shopping. If you're one of those people that go out and does all your Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, things are going to be picked over. People will have already bought a lot of stuff and there's things that may not be available and even if it only takes a day or two on Christmas Eve, a day or two would be a day or two too late. The same thing with our professional services and requirements is that we need to make sure that we're keeping those holidays and lull or extremely busy times in mind so that we can get our orders in early enough that they can be properly processed and stuff returned back to us, results given to us in the time that we need them. That's it. I'm going to keep this one short because it really is one of those just to think about. I thought about it as looking at the idea of podcasts and books and similar products that you have a lead time before you produce them, before they're actually shipped. There's certain things we've got to do beforehand. If you've got a big idea or you've got a new idea, take a look at the vendors involved and make sure that they're going to be available. If not, what are their cutoff dates so you know what your deadlines are in order to get it done in a timely manner? Challenge of the week. Have you thought of how you want to handle maybe the holidays coming up? Maybe it would be worth it for you to take an extra week off or internally maybe your company, you have a quiet period or something like that where it allows you to maybe catch up. Take advantage of the technical debt, allow for people to do vacations and stuff like that without there being too much stress on those that stick around. Take advantage of this time and make the most of it. That being said, go out there and make the most of your day and have yourself a great one and a great week. We will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon and other podcast venues or visit our site at developernord.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, Developer Nord podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. If you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernord.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.