Why do IT teams work during the holidays?

IT teams often work during holidays because it's the only quiet period in the year. With fewer tickets, access requests, and interruptions, holidays become the window for catching up on backlog work like access reconciliation, license audits, and offboarding cleanup - tasks that pile up during normal operations.

What is access reconciliation?

Access reconciliation is the process of comparing who currently has access to applications against who should have access based on their role, employment status, and business need. It's typically a manual, time-consuming process that IT teams defer until they have uninterrupted time - often during holidays or audit season.

Why does manual provisioning create so much work?

Manual provisioning means every new hire, role change, and departure requires human action across multiple applications. Mistakes happen. Things get missed. Over time, access drifts out of sync with reality - creating a growing backlog of cleanup, reconciliation, and audit prep work that IT must eventually address.

How can IT reduce holiday backlog work?

Automating user provisioning and deprovisioning eliminates most backlog work at the source. When joiners get access automatically, leavers lose access automatically, and license usage is tracked continuously - there's no cleanup to catch up on. The reconciliation happens in real-time, not during holiday weeks.

Why can't IT do this work during normal business hours?

During normal operations, IT operates in reactive mode - responding to urgent tickets, access requests, password resets, and "quick favor" requests that never stop coming. Each interruption takes 10 minutes, but they're constant. There's no protected time for cleanup work like access reconciliation or license audits. The holidays are the only period quiet enough to surface from firefighting and tackle the backlog that accumulated all year.

IT Worked the Holidays: 68% Spent Break on Access Cleanup, Not Emergencies

TL;DR

68% of IT teams worked the holidays. Not emergencies - backlog.

The only quiet week of the year, spent on:

Access cleanups
License reconciliation
Offboarding stragglers
Audit prep
Spreadsheet documentation

This work piles up all year because there's never breathing room. Most of it traces back to manual provisioning.

If this work didn't exist, they could have rested - or finally tackled the automation that keeps getting deprioritized. Instead, they spent the holidays on work that shouldn't exist.

Holiday break? IT calls it catch-up week.

Everyone else logged off. IT logged in.

December 26th. The office is empty. Slack is silent. No tickets coming in. No "urgent" access requests. No one pinging about a password reset.

For most of the company, this is vacation.

For IT, this is the only time they can actually work.

We talked to IT teams across the industry about the week between Christmas and New Year's 2024. The number surprised us: 68% were actively working.

Not on-call. Not responding to emergencies. Working. On the things they couldn't get to the other 50 weeks of the year.

What were they doing?

Not strategic projects. Not the automation roadmap. Not the employee experience improvements they've been wanting to build.

They were doing cleanup:

Access reconciliation

Finally matching who has access to what against who should have access to what

License audits

Tracking down unused seats, orphaned accounts, contractors who left months ago

Offboarding stragglers

The ex-employees who still show up in five different apps

Audit prep

Getting evidence together for Q1 compliance reviews

Documentation

Updating the spreadsheets that track what the systems can't

This isn't the work IT wants to do. It's the work IT has to do - because it piles up relentlessly during the year.

Why it piles up

During normal operations, IT is in reactive mode. Tickets come in. Fires get fought. The urgent displaces the important.

New hire needs access to six apps by EOD
Someone's locked out of Salesforce
Manager needs a report on who has access to what
Auditor asking about a terminated employee's accounts
"Can you just add this contractor real quick?"

Each task takes 10 minutes. But they never stop coming. There's no protected time for the cleanup work. No "access reconciliation Tuesdays." Just a backlog that grows until everyone else goes on vacation.

The holidays aren't a break for IT. They're the pressure release valve.

The work that shouldn't exist

A lot of this work traces back to manual provisioning.

When provisioning is automated

New hires get access on day one without tickets
Departing employees lose access automatically
License reconciliation happens continuously, not annually
Audit evidence generates itself
The spreadsheets become unnecessary

When provisioning is manual

Every joiner, mover, and leaver creates downstream cleanup
Offboarding is "best effort" with inevitable misses
Licenses drift out of sync with reality
Audit prep becomes a scramble
Someone has to maintain the source of truth by hand

The 68% of IT teams working the holidays weren't doing strategic work. They were paying down the debt that manual provisioning creates all year long.

The real opportunity cost

What could IT have done with that week?

Option A: Actually rest

IT burnout is real. The constant firefighting takes a toll. A week of genuine disconnection - not "checking in occasionally" but actually off - is valuable. IT earned it.

Option B: Build things that matter

The automation projects that keep getting deprioritized. The employee onboarding experience that's still clunky. The self-service tools that would reduce ticket volume. The integrations that would make everyone's life easier.

Instead, they spent the holidays on access cleanups and license reconciliation. Work that only exists because the infrastructure to eliminate it isn't in place.

That's the real cost of manual provisioning. Not just the dollars - the opportunity cost of IT's time and energy going to maintenance instead of improvement.

What if this backlog didn't exist?

Imagine IT's holiday week if provisioning was automated:

Access reconciliation? Happens continuously. Nothing to catch up on.
License audits? The system knows who's using what. No detective work required.
Offboarding stragglers? There are none. Deprovisioning happened automatically.
Audit prep? Evidence is already generated. Pull the report.
Documentation? The system is the documentation.

The backlog disappears. The holiday week becomes what it should be: either rest, or time for the strategic work that actually moves the organization forward.

We see you

To the IT teams who worked the holidays: we see you.

You weren't slacking the rest of the year. You were drowning in tickets and access requests and "quick favors" that are never quick. The holidays were your only chance to surface.

This isn't a failure of IT. It's a failure of the tools and systems that should be handling this automatically. We analyzed 721 SaaS apps: 57% have no SCIM at any price. Another 42% lock it behind enterprise pricing. That's 98.8% of apps creating this backlog. Provisioning that's paywalled behind enterprise tiers. Apps that don't support SCIM at all. The manual workarounds that become permanent.

You shouldn't have to trade your holidays for access cleanups.

Make next year different

Stitchflow automates provisioning and deprovisioning for apps that don't support SCIM - or lock it behind pricing you can't justify.

The cleanup work that ate your holidays? It doesn't have to exist.

Book a Demo - and get your next holiday break back.

IT Worked the Holidays. Not Because of Emergencies - Because It Was Finally Quiet.