Organise the Christmas party? Easy!

Christmas parties are fun. And organising the Christmas party can be a chance for you to expand your role, enhance your skill set, and have glory heaped upon you (preferably in public at the same time as the fun). Getting from the point when you seize your opportunity to shine, to the thanks at the end, is much easier when you know some key things about project management.

Project management is about achieving your objective by a certain point on the calendar for a given cost, or, in other words: the job in the time for the money. You are already capable of working out what has to be done and the priority order of tasks. Project management skills help you deal with the responsibility for others.

Your first action is to find out the scope of your project. You will have to manage the scope as it goes along, or you will find that your intimate meal for ten staff has become a dinner dance for two hundred while your budget has remained the same. Make sure that each change in scope is accompanied by a change in budget - if you don't have a budget at this point, don't go any further until you have one.

Establish how many people the party is for, and what the aim of the event is. Is it to help consolidate the team or to reward people for working hard? Is there anything that absolutely must be included, such as the company awards ceremony or a present giving by Santa for small children?

Next, get a timeline and a budget. The timeline doesn't have to be fixed immediately - the actual date may depend on finding a venue - but it is vital that you have a budget.

You need to know who is footing the bill. Will the company pay for everything or will they underwrite an event that attempts to be self-financing with ticket sales? Do you have to make a profit? If you don't, can you plough proceeds back into the event? What will happen if you don't make money? Work out much you have to spend per head on things such as food, and identify any one-off costs that will come from different funding sources.

Figures may change once you get quotations from vendors so factor in at least 10% contingency in each item. Don't forget things such as sales tax and delivery charges.

Project management usually counts people as resources and will factor in their time as a cost. Be aware of this, as it can help justify choosing what seems to be a more expensive option on the face of it. Your thought process may be, 'If I make the decorations on company time it will take £10 in materials and five hours of my time at £20 cost to the company, whereas buying them will cost £25.' It is unlikely that you will need to calculate this for company staff but you will for contractors. Work out how much you will need to spend on equipment such as hiring a marquee and lights, and how much you can spend on materials for decoration, party favours etc.

When you have thought of absolutely everything you will need for the event, work out who can provide it, what it will cost and the time it will need. Start with the key things such as the venue and get quotations for both cost and time from providers. Look for dependencies - the stage needs to be put up the day before the stage lights are installed. This will be your schedule - what needs to be done by whom at what time. And remember - the quickest way to run over budget is to fall behind schedule.

Project management software can be useful but much of the scheduling can be done just as well in a spreadsheet. Create a Gantt chart (a cornerstone of project management tools) for your tasks and you will see how it is nearly always impossible to run all tasks sequentially.

Some tasks will have flexible start or end times. This is 'float'. Those tasks with unmoveable start or end times have no float. Draw a line through the start point of all the tasks with no float to get the critical path of your project. All the tasks on this path must be on schedule if your project is going to be on time. You can manage the path by adding people resources - if the decorations arrive late drafting more people in to help will get you back on track. You can also modify your tasks - halve the number of balloons to blow up and you have saved time.

When you have your budget and your schedule and you have allocated your people resources (asked them nicely to do something for you at a certain time), you can sit back and wait for the project to run to its conclusion. Unless you work with normal people, which inevitably means you will have to check, double check, and recheck with them as they do things! Be proactive - when giving them a task state how long you think it will take them, and then check with them just before they need to have started the task to see how it is going. If you think they are going to let you down despite all this, plan an alternative. If need be, do it yourself to ensure your project stays on track.

Information is all-important to you when managing your project. This often comes in the form of paper - receipts, order forms, quotations. File it all, including all electronic correspondence. If something goes wrong you will need a record of what was agreed - if it's not confirmed in writing, you can't trust it. You information needs to be current - get updates on status regularly and before something is late. Most of all, if you don't have the information you need, ask for it.

And remember - as a secretary or PA, project management is something that you have been doing for yourself every day. It is probably yet another example of the many management skills you have already begun to develop without realising it. Using more formal methods will build on what you already know, strengthen your expertise, and enable you to declare it on your growing list of skills.