Stepping into the shoes of the Project Manager handling multiple projects could be quite overwhelming. It feels like managing innumerable project activities with altogether different teams to manage. It is not a cakewalk and can be a juggling act for Project Managers as they need to be mindful of their involvement & equal attention given to all the projects, without leaving any of them behind suffering in achieving their project objectives. Switching between various project meetings in a day could be quite stressful at times, which could lead to oversights & inadvertent behavior. Keeping a tab on all the moving pieces of various projects, their impediments, resource constraints, task dependencies, conflicting timelines, stakeholder’s management, etc. can be too intimidating & complicated for PMs to manage. PM’s skills would be gauged on how dynamically they manage their bandwidth to make their presence feel to all the project stakeholders, thereby doing due diligence to all the tasks/activities of the project. While the Project Management framework remains the same across all the projects that PMs typically follow, one needs to go one step ahead in equipping oneself with few techniques to smartly maneuver through the challenges that arise while managing multiple projects simultaneously. Below are 5 tips one can start with to help you in this quest:

Prioritize Projects: Projects vary based on their objectives & the areas where they could be potentially challenging. Customer too-demanding, complex & fast-moving domain, strategic importance for an organization, too many stakeholders to manage, active involvement of customer’s executive are a few of the factors projects can be distinguished from one other. Given the varied nature of projects, PMs should bear in mind that which projects deserve more attention during what stage of their delivery. This will help them to prioritize the project tasks and his involvement in them on any given day. Even priorities need to be set of all the tasks needed to execute in a project – critical ones vs nice to have, only to manage his bandwidth in its most optimum way.

Build Self-organized teams: Hassling all around for executing several projects can only make you tiresome and a team vulnerable. Inspire the culture of empowerment. Build teams that are self-organized and need not require any follow-ups or triggers from any one person. Team members should coach & mentor each other only to evolve themselves as a one matured team which can overcome any roadblock by themselves. In order to let this happen, PMs, while leading primitive teams, should facilitate by focusing more on “Why” than merely sticking with “How to”. This is where the agile philosophy of building teams comes in. While forming matured teams, PMs need to look out for team members who go beyond their duty & love involving themselves in key project decision-making and delegate a few leadership tasks to them, so that they grow & lead teams even when PMs are not around. This would reduce the dependency on PMs.

Having a common dashboard for all the projects: Advanced project management tools help facilitate PMs to have a common view of all the tasks mapped to various projects in a single dashboard. This will give him insights on various project parameters like project timelines, workloads of team members across projects, start & end dates, overall project slack, critical activities, inter-project task dependencies, etc. This would let PMs achieve complete visibility on common project components, resource loading, cost-control areas based on which they can apply a few PM methods and make certain key decisions. Also, PMs need to organize documents & relevant artifacts of all the projects in one place (something like a structured shared repository), so that they don’t have to search emails or ask for any file accesses when they are in need of certain information.

Optimize the Project Schedule: Baselining & re-baselining the project schedule as the project progresses is something PMs do regularly. And when it is a matter of multiple projects, re-baselining is inevitable given the task & team-member overlapping that it would entail. PMs need to optimize the project's schedule in order to boost the team’s productivity. Solutions like consolidating the same piece of work & assigning it to the same person, if found in multiple projects, can go a long way in improving the team’s productivity. If the same team is required to deliver 2-3 projects, then their start & end dates can be staggered rather than having them work on all projects at the same time.

Managing Communication Expectations: Communication lies at the heart of everything. A communication plan is really important in charting out the communication needs of all the stakeholders. Only when PMs ensure that effective communication is happening across projects, can manage projects successfully with minimal intervention. The visibility of each other’s tasks, their, strengths, weaknesses, working style builds trust & confidence, thereby, are the genesis of building highly successful teams. Teams should understand the context of re-baselining the project plans & the challenges PMs are faced with in ensuring timely deliveries for all the projects. The simplest way to make this happen is using a work management tool that can radiate the relevant information related to project progress, issues & impediments to all the concerned stakeholders to have collective visibility on all the projects.

Multiple projects can be related ones and have a common program goal and PMs need to ensure that an alignment is achieved with the strategic goals as well. In this dynamic world, PMs would be tasked with managing multiple projects (small & large sized) and so managing innumerable communication lines, several ongoing issues, daily team alignment & building the right culture can be an uphill & overwhelming task for PMs. Hopefully, these techniques would help ease out the severity of that chaotic situation it could build up for PMs surrounded by so many projects.

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