Managing Multiple Projects

How Project Managers Can Balance Priorities, Manage Expectations and Increase Productivity

Elizabeth Harrin

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781398605510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Project management is changing. Rather than focusing solely on one large project, the majority of project managers are now expected to juggle multiple projects, which brings a different set of challenges. Between a greater number of project sponsors, resource conflicts and constant pressure from deadlines, it can be difficult to avoid burnout. Managing Multiple Projects blends formal project management techniques with time management and productivity tools in a step-by-step approach to consolidating your workload. From combining schedules to prioritising work and engaging stakeholders, this book clearly explains how to adapt your behaviour and techniques to successfully work on several projects at once.This practical guide provides answers to commonly asked questions (such as how to reduce the number of meetings and how to manage a To Do list) and includes case studies from real project managers. Checklists for common tasks and adaptable templates of trackers and reports are combined with easily actioned exercises to improve processes. Managing Multiple Projects gives practitioners the tools they need to improve the chances of project success and maintain a work-life balance. Online resources include downloadable templates of productivity checklists and status reports.

03

Concept #1: Portfolio: understanding your workload

The majority of project managers run between two and five projects at any one time (Harrin, 2021a). However, 15 per cent of project managers reported running over ten projects simultaneously. On top of a project workload, most employees have other tasks to do that do not fall within the boundaries of a project or an actual day job beyond managing projects. That’s a lot of activities to fill your time.

The number of projects you are asked to lead depends on a wide variety of factors. Research by Kuprenas et al (2000) shows that prior experience is the factor that most influences the workload for a project manager. From that, we can conclude that if you have shown yourself to be a safe pair of hands running multiple projects in the past, you will likely be asked to take on a multi-project workload in the future. Complexity is another factor that influences workload: the same research also shows that project managers tend to get fewer highly complex projects. That means you may have a couple of high cost, high complexity projects or a larger number of low cost, low complexity projects. What is it for you?

The first concept covered by the framework for managing multiple projects is to create a personal portfolio, as shown in Figure 3.1. This is a summary statement of your work in list form that documents everything you are currently responsible for. The portfolio is important because before you can structure and streamline your work, you need to know exactly what that work looks like. The action of creating a personal portfolio serves three purposes:

1. It gives you the full picture of what is on your To Do list.
2. It provides clarity about what is expected of you.
3. It creates the information you need to communicate about your workload with other people.

Figure 3.1 The Portfolio concept in the managing multiple projects framework

This chapter gives you the tools to understand and prioritize your workload, which is the foundation for being able to effectively prioritize time and make smarter decisions about how to consolidate some of your project management activity. You’ll learn what portfolio management is and how you can use the principles of portfolio thinking to run your To Do list like a portfolio manager.

What is portfolio management?

The seventh edition of the APM Body of Knowledge (2019) defines a portfolio as ‘a collection of projects and/or programmes used to structure and manage investments at an organizational or functional level to optimize strategy benefits or operational efficiency’. In other words, a portfolio is a way to group, structure and oversee the project-related work being undertaken across the organization or functional area, so that the highest value, most beneficial work takes priority. For example, an IT portfolio would list all the projects, programmes and larger pieces of operational work that the IT department is working on at any given moment in time. It could also include information about projects that are going through the approval process or waiting to start, along with any pieces of work that are currently on hold. The portfolio is the whole picture of the work for the team, usually as it relates to delivering change.

In practice, portfolios can take many forms. A portfolio can be:

• A collection of related work, for example work to do with a particular department.
• A collection of unrelated projects where it is helpful to manage them together, for example the portfolio for a whole organization, where projects happening in different departments do not necessarily relate to each other, but management wants visibility of all the work that is happening across the organization.

The benefit of thinking about work in this cohesive, combined way is that you can use the big picture to make better decisions. Portfolio management is that decision-making effort: it describes the work involved in managing a portfolio, including the choices that get made about the projects. It’s a common concept within the world of strategy execution and project delivery because it allows for comparisons and rankings between projects based on different factors like priority, risk, cost, the effort involved and the amount of time the work will take (Durbin and Doerscher, 2010). You also have to make choices about how to invest your time and effort, so portfolio management lends itself well to thinking about your own workload too.

According to Reiss and Rayner (2013) the term ‘portfolio management’ has two interpretations:

• A management layer: the people responsible for the selection and delivery of any changes, projects or programmes within the organization.
• A process: the decision steps and workflow for choosing what gets done in what order.

As an individual managing a number of projects, the management layer aspect of portfolio management is simply you, and perhaps your direct manager or the people who assign you work. You may have a greater or lesser influence over the work you are asked to do. A small business owner will have a larger influence over the selection of projects to do because those choices are within their personal control. An employee will have less of a say about what they work on because those decisions are typically made by the hierarchical levels of management above them.

The process aspect is where you will have greater control: ultimately, you can decide how to spend your time each day and how you organize your work to combine activities to give you the best results.

Portfolio thinking

Managing a portfolio requires a specific way of thinking: a joined up, holistic way of looking at everything with a view to creating balance, assessing priorities and making choices. At an organizational level, portfolio thinking is shaped and constrained by what the Praxis Framework (undated) defines as the seven components of portfolio management:

1. Establishing an infrastructure to support projects and programmes.
2. Defining management procedures and processes to be used consistently across projects and programmes.
3. Optimizing the allocation of available resources by managing supply and demand.
4. Maintaining a portfolio that balances strategic objectives in changing conditions.
5. Improving the delivery of projects and programmes through a co-ordinated view of risk, resources, dependencies and schedules.
6. Co-ordinating the need for change with the capacity of the organization to absorb change.
7. Reducing costs by removing overlapping and poorly performing projects and programmes.

These elements reflect how an organization would want to str...