Scaling Your Project Management Skills: Managing Multiple Projects with Ease

Early in my project management career, I joined a small tech company specializing in customized software solutions. Initially, the company had a limited number of projects, but over time, the workload grew. This led me to notice several factors affecting my performance:

• Increasing project volume with limited team capacity
• Higher demands from management compared to a small delivery pipeline
• Constantly juggling multiple priorities daily
• Spending more time at the office and less at home, leading to increased stress
• Facing unrealistic deadlines set by Sales when deals were finalized with clients

I soon found myself at a crossroads.

If this situation sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.

Handling multiple projects is always challenging. So, what are the main factors that make it so difficult?

Let’s examine each factor in detail.

Focus

Each project comes with its own unique set of challenges, including scope, risks, client expectations, stakeholders, timelines, and costs.

For a project manager handling multiple projects, staying focused can become a significant challenge. Here are some key factors that contribute to this difficulty:

• Team members requesting assistance to resolve blockers
• Clients seeking project updates
• Management requesting status reports
• Projects exceeding time and cost estimates
• Emergencies, such as the sudden absence of a key team member
• Quality issues arising in production releases

Now, imagine a project manager overseeing five projects—multiplying these critical issues across all projects gives a sense of the workload they face.

So, how can a project manager maintain focus across multiple projects?

To be honest, multitasking is not the answer. The human brain isn't designed for it. For a project manager to succeed, they must dedicate quality time to each project.

The first step is to break the day into dedicated time slots for each project. This time-boxing allows a PM to focus fully on one project at a time. However, this raises a new challenge: how to prioritize which projects should receive attention?

Before time-boxing, it’s crucial to clearly set priorities at the start of each day. It’s often impossible to give every project quality time in a single day. Instead, aim to identify 3 to 5 priority projects that can receive focused attention.

Prioritization might depend on:

• Upcoming project deliverable deadlines
• Urgent issues or emergencies
• Resolving significant blockers that impede progress
• Addressing a demanding client
• Planning a status update for management

A project manager should assess the current list of issues across projects and prioritize accordingly to effectively structure the day.

Shared Resources

Shared Resources is another major factor that creates trouble in managing multiple projects.

Resources are always limited and their availability is always timebound. In addition, the skills set and competency may also vary. These all factors create challenges for a PM.

How to manage shared resources in multiple projects?

The answer is Capacity Planning.

This should be done for each resource irrespective of any projects.

The planning may be done for a quarter or whatever time period it is realistic to create a capacity plan.

The plan must address the total number of working days available for each resource minus all the planned leaves and the holidays applicable to that time frame in which capacity is being planned. The remaining days constitute the capacity for the resource. To make it more realistic, the number of available days should be reduced by 20%. 100% — 20% = 80%

Each resource should be planned at 80% capacity of the available time. This productive capacity means a team member should be Laser focused on the assigned task. No meetings, No Standup, Just work.

The next phase is prioritization of Projects / Tasks.

It should be done based on the business value, deadlines , resource availability or any other factor that forces to rank a project higher over other projects.

The next step is to estimate all the work (New Projects, Changes to existing Projects, Operational stuff) at a high level to know how much work can be delivered with the available capacity. For this, any spread sheet or any tool can be used to keep the projects information along with the resources required with ball park estimates from each resource. This will give portfolio level visibility of all projects, all resources engaged on the projects and can highlight conflicts of shared resources on multiple projects. This exercise though looks simple on paper but hard to execute or may create further issues / conflicts if another activity “Alignment” is not done.

Alignment

If you are working in a Matrix organisation or a Projectized one, the alignment is of utmost importance.

Working in a projectized organisation requires a PM to align with the other Project Managers who have the resources reporting to them.

But Working in a Matrix organisation requires a PM to align with the Functional Managers who have the resources reporting to them as well as with other Project Managers who are using those resources in their projects.

Alignment in multiple projects if not done appropriately creates blockers in executing the projects. So when a PM finalises any plan for his/her project, it must be aligned with the relevant Functional Lead and other PMs who are using the same pool of resources.

The following activities may be adopted to get the desired alignment.

• Meetings with Functional Managers to identify the appropriate resources required from their teams on the projects/tasks in hand.
• Alignment with other PMs who are using the same pool of resources on their projects to avoid the availability conflicts.

This alignment is an ongoing activity. This is not something that can be done once and it is considered enough. Due to the new changes / unforeseen issues, the alignment should be practised by a PM more often.

Centralised Source of Information

Once capacity planning and alignment are done, the same information should be available in a centralised repository containing following information.

Project wise resource mapping, estimated work days/hours and the available time slot of the resource for that project.

This information serves as a single source of truth for all future capacity assignments in case of new projects/ changes in the existing projects.

There are various tools in the market that could be used.

Excel or Google sheet can also be used to serve the same purpose.

Note: Regular reviews and timely updates in this repository are keys to effectively manage the challenges of Shared resources.

Expectations Management

On a single project, it is pretty obvious to communicate with the same stakeholders almost anything about the project. But it becomes a challenge in a multi-project environment where people on different projects have expectations from a single PM to update them and meet their expectations.

How to manage expectations in multiple projects?

I will describe this issue from two aspects.

1. Managing Expectations with team members
2. Managing Expectations with Client / External Stakeholders

Managing Expectations with team members:

Key strategies are:

• For each meeting / stand-up with the team on a project, a PM must identify the key Action Points. Assign them to the relevant people in the team and make them Accountable by sharing the minutes with the stakeholders
• Processes or SOPs must be in a documented form
• Agile environment expects the team members to be collaborative and self organized. The same cultural values to be reiterated / emphasized / coached and practiced.
• Putting a performance management system in place to evaluate each team member's performance against the key metrics e.g. timely delivery, quality, collaboration, ownership etc.
• Having 1 on 1s to know the key inputs from team members

Managing Expectations with Client / External Stakeholders:

Being a PM we strive our best to know our stakeholders and meet their expectations but in multiple projects, this becomes more challenging.

Timely communication and negotiation are the key to set and manage expectations.

For example a Client wants X feature on Y date. But PM knows that Y date cannot be met. So this should be communicated to client well in advance. In case the date is hard blocker then Negotiation skills come into play where a PM should negotiate a Win Win situation.

This negotiation may be done with the team on how much realistically can be delivered by Y date. And this negotiation can be done with the Client to know how much he/she is flexible on the scope of delivery.

While there are tons of information to communicate, grab and digest, following are the most important factors around which expectations should be set very clearly and without any ambiguity.

• Expected timelines
• Project Deliverables
• Out of Scope deliverables
• Expected Cost or payment schedule
• Change Management mechanism to control scope creep, SOPs for requirement grooming / story writing
• Project Quality requirements including standards, functional and non functional (security, performance, usability, compliance etc.)

Firefighting

How to avoid Firefighting in multiple projects?

This is a trap and most of the time Project Managers don’t know they are consuming their valuable time in Firefighting. If we look at the activities they do you will find that many activities can be proactively avoided or managed in a better way.

Why is there firefighting in projects? Some common myths are:

• It’s much easier to fix issues as they occur than to sit down and try to avoid the issues before they happen.
• Long term planning is even harder. Who can tell the future?
• Methodologies require discipline and take up considerable time which is not available specially in multiple projects

This firefighting can be damaging to a PM’s performance, mood, and even for their growth as they are not able to apply creative thinking to the problems at hand and often compromise on the quality of processes being followed or somehow burn out team members working on their projects.

Although this problem may be mitigated if a PM carefully manages expectations of stakeholders across the board. But due to a specific nature of a project, some surprises may pop up along the way. Here I would suggest one technique that is neglected most of the time specially in multi project environment which is Risk Management.

I can understand that PMs have a lot of pressure on different projects from different stakeholders. The urge to deliver at a fast pace also pushes PM into the situation where PM just does enough plan and jumps into the execution. This is the reason I am not very much advocate of a heavy weight risk management. However I strongly suggest lightweight risk management for each project.

How to manage risks in multiple small projects?

Shared Risk Register

This register should have an inventory of a reasonable number of the most common risks that occur in your projects along with the proposed mitigation Actions. This is extremely helpful if all projects are using the same pool of resources

While Planning any project, a PM can look into the inventory of risks and identify which ones are most relevant to his / her project. In addition, he/she can add up more risks depending on the unique project requirements to the list if they are not found in the inventory but have a high tendency to occur.

During the execution of the project I suggest to keep an eye on only High Priority / High Impact Issues and adjust the project plan along the way.

This high level risk identification may help PM while communicating the project timelines to the stake holders. Based on the assessment of the risks, a PM can mention if the timeline has a High confidence for delivery or Medium / Low.

The risks may also help in compiling status reports during the execution of the project and can help PM to intimate about the potential issues that may occur and get the necessary support from the management.

Risk Management is very broad area but doing a light weight High Priority Risks assessment may help a PM to avoid firefighting and may furnish more control over the projects.

Conclusion

Managing multiple projects is undeniably challenging, but with the right strategies, it’s entirely possible to navigate these complexities effectively. Throughout this blog, we explored the key factors that make multi-project management demanding: focus switching, shared resources, expectations management, and firefighting.

To maintain focus, it’s crucial to avoid multitasking and instead dedicate specific time slots to each project based on clear daily priorities.

Capacity planning is essential for managing shared resources, ensuring that team members are allocated realistically to maintain productivity.

Alignment with functional managers and other project managers is vital to avoid conflicts and ensure smooth execution.

Managing stakeholder expectations involves clear communication, timely updates, and effective negotiation to balance competing demands.

Finally, proactive risk management, even in a lightweight form, can significantly reduce the need for firefighting, allowing project managers to anticipate potential issues and plan accordingly.

By implementing these strategies, project managers can enhance their ability to juggle multiple projects, leading to better outcomes, reduced stress, and improved overall performance.

What other challenges do you face while managing multiple projects?

Bilal Warsi is a seasoned Project and Program Management professional with 20 years of experience. He currently serves as the Manager of Program Management at DigitalOcean .

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