Multi-project management: 6 principles for good organization
Multi-projects mean a great need for efficiency. Here are 6 practical tips that will allow you to “keep your head above water” if you have to manage or are involved in multiple projects.
Having the right reflexes in multi-project management is all the more important if you have to ensure your operational activities in addition to your projects. There are 3 essential questions to ask yourself:
- How to fit all your activities into the week?
- How to manage the multitude of requests and the splitting of activities?
- How can I maintain my sense of personal effectiveness and avoid feeling overwhelmed and like nothing is moving forward?
1. Limit the number of your projects
A work week is only 5 days long, or 10 half-days. List all your current projects and ask yourself: How much work should I reasonably devote to each of these projects? Add them up! If this workload exceeds 10 half-days, you have a problem!
If you add to that the time you have to devote to your current activities and the vagaries of projects, your problem is even bigger. So it is time to sort through your projects and limit their number . It is common to say that serious value-added involvement in a project requires at least half a day of work . Do the math, your involvement should be limited to 10 projects at most!
2. How to prioritize your projects?
After this first point, you need to limit the number of projects and activities in which you are involved? So now it is time to sort them out. To do this, we suggest analyzing your projects according to 2 criteria: urgency and importance.
Importance should be analyzed in terms of the impact of the project on achieving your professional and personal goals and the impact on the organization. The urgency criterion refers to the time frame in which the project must be implemented. By combining these 2 criteria, you will know whether you absolutely must carry out the project yourself or whether you should consider having it carried out by someone else.
3. Assertively accept your choices
You have now sorted through the projects to be carried out. It is a question of delegating the projects that you wish to stop and refusing new requests for projects that are not a priority for you. 2 strategies are available to you:
- Negotiate with your contact to make the project acceptable to you. You can negotiate: deadlines, workload, scope of the task or the resources made available to you.
- Say no diplomatically, that is to say explain factually, using the reflection carried out thanks to the 2 previous tips, why you will not be able to carry out the project, despite its interest.
4. Focus on your essential tasks and projects
The major risk that awaits you in multi-project management is the splitting of activities.
Extreme fragmentation of your activities and interruptions, in addition to the loss of efficiency, will generate mental fatigue and significant stress . It has been shown that it is better to serialize tasks by devoting yourself fully to them than to try to do them in parallel by constantly "switching" from one activity to another. Concentration and focus on background tasks is the key to efficiency.
To ensure concentration, what could be better than booking dedicated slots of 1 to 2 hours in your diary devoted to your projects (including project meetings). Be careful, however, to leave time in your diary for managing unforeseen events, hazards, and informal interactions .
5. Save time by professionalizing your project meetings
The core of a project manager's activity is to coordinate the project stakeholders to achieve the project objective. This translates into multiple meetings for each of the projects managed. Well-managed project meetings will save you a lot of time and increase your efficiency . To do this:
- Schedule your progress meetings once and for all, on the same day, at the same time and why not in the same room (virtual if necessary). This will save you valuable organizational time.
- Always use the same agenda: what was achieved last week, problems or risks that arose, actions to be implemented.
- Keep your meetings to a time limit (no more than one hour). Do not try to solve complex problems in the meeting, but assign the competent members of the team to solve them and outline the action in the minutes.
- Use a weekly updated action and decision summary table as a record. This document is updated during the meeting and does not require time to write a report after the meeting.
6. Take care of your sense of personal effectiveness
The stress of the mental load of all your projects can develop your feeling that despite your constant involvement, nothing is moving forward. It is therefore important to sow stones that will make you realize that although the path is difficult, you are moving forward !
If you have implemented the previous tips, you will have identified realistic multi-project management objectives and transformed them into concrete actions until implementation in your agenda.
Every weekend, take stock of what has been accomplished during the week on each of the projects. You will see that they are progressing and will probably be surprised by all that has been accomplished.
