3 Key Fundamentals to Staying Sane While Managing Multiple Projects At The Same Time.

With the increase of automated collaboration tools in the PM industry. PM’s managing multiple projects at the same time is somewhat becoming the new norm, however successfully managing projects simultaneously definitely has its challenges as it can be mentally strenuous. This creates the need to implement strategies that can be used as a guide to enable you to manage projects efficiently at the same time. Here are the 3 key strategies that I think are critical in managing multiple projects successfully;

1. Delegate and Prioritise

As obvious as it may be that you cannot do everything yourself, sometimes as PM’s we want to make sure that certain tasks have been completed according to our requirements. In order to determine what to delegate you can have a list of tasks required to be done and categorise them in terms of their priority level. This creates a list of tasks that you can let go of and delegate to other team members to complete. It’s very important to keep an updated task list of everything you’re required to do, including deadlines. This way, nothing will be forgotten, and if something needs to be moved out, you can quickly see which items are the lowest priority. Methods such as Steve covey’s priority matrix and MIT (Most important task) can be used to help simplifying the order of which tasks to complete first.

2. Combine all schedules of different projects into one view

Combining all your project schedules into one view helps in identifying conflicting dates and isolate potential issues in advance. For example, if you have two separate project schedules, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint when you’re expected to be in two places at once. Scheduling software tools such as Asana, Trello and Kanban flow to name a few will allow you to combine schedules, or to view them together for conflicts. The dream is to never have project milestones happening at the same time but as projects seldom follow schedules with 100% accuracy, combining your schedules is definitely a must to avoid such catastrophic situations.

3. Communicate

It is important to keep frequent communication to all stakeholders involved (yes including your project team) on the workload that you’ll be managing. This helps in managing exceptions of stakeholders and alleviates the process of getting additional support if need be .

What other suggestions do you have that help you manage multiple projects at the same time ? drop a comment and let us know.