5 Most Common Mistakes in Managing Multiple Projects: Learn to Avoid Them (Part 3)

It’s great to see that my series about 5 Most Common Mistakes in Managing Multiple Projects turned out so popular. I got a number of requests to keep on posting. So please welcome the third part of the series. If you misses the first or the second part of the sequence please make sure to check them out.




Mistake #3: Keeping project plans separated from each other

When you manage multiple projects in separate places, using different tools for planning, you waste hours on bouncing from one schedule to another. Moreover, you’ll never have a whole picture of your projects, which will inevitably result in conflicting due dates and personal schedule conflicts, and therefore will damage your project delivery time. Separated project schedules make it extremely hard for you to figure out task sequences and priorities across your multiple projects. In this case, you are sure to turn up being a manager who runs from project to project, grabbing at straws.

Winning strategy #3:  Integrate project schedules

An integrated project plan will give you a bird’s eye view of your work. Create a master project plan that will include a timeline for each project. This structure should be absolutely transparent, so that it’s possible to trace any project from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. Besides identifying the major project milestones and their dates, this plan should reflect all the tasks on all of your projects. You then will be able to determine the tasks’ priorities across projects and identify which project milestones to concentrate on.

To create a master plan, you may need an integrated project planning tool.  This kind of tool also will help you unify your reporting for each project and bring it to one standard.

What's more, the master plan will help you to save lots of time, as you’ll have all the information in one place and at hand.

The 4th part will be published next week. Now, please share your thoughts and conclusions about this short post.

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Comments (5)

• Denis, Friday, 23 April, 2010
  I agree with you in principle but I think trying to manage a giant, combined project plan sounds extremely difficult. To me it seems better to keep the plans separate and just focus on the dependencies between the plans
  
  http://www.expertprogrammanagement.com
• Inebi, Wednesday, 07 July, 2010
  True Andrew its best to have a bird eye view of all projects on a Master Project Plan. Each Project should then have its own plan (I suppose). This will take more effort as a PM but will keep you on track as you know what is going on with all the projects. Progress & changes should be monitored simultaneously & immediately.
• Anngeo, Friday, 23 July, 2010
  I totally agree with your concept, project manager need to be multiskilled people. I'm studying Certiv Frontline Mgt actually and will move on to the Diploma of Business Mgt and that's what i did : a course and task planner combining the deadline dates for the each unit together with daily tasks to be done progressively, within a time table and it helped keep focus on every bits and pieces, on the less important or on more critical parts. While reading 1st, 2nd & 3rd strategies I realised that i was doing the same and that i'm on the right track.
• David, Wednesday, 28 July, 2010
  I think this very much depends on what type of projects you are managing.
  
  Some projects require serious high end project management skills with milestones and timelines being a very important part of the planning process. Many companies only work on projects of this type e.g. civil engineering company
  
  However many other companies work is made up of smaller more flexible projects with varying time scales and complexity. These are much harder to plan precisely and the danger is that the project management planning will take far too long with too little benefit.
  For companies like this, the best project management systems are those which require very little effort and time to incorporate into your workflow whilst still having a significant impact on responsibilities, visibility and overall communication.
• Bruce Lofland, Wednesday, 04 August, 2010
  This article seems to assume that the multiple projects that the PM is managing are related in some way. It would create more confusion I think to combine them and change them all at the same time. Consistent tools and processes are efficient, but creating a master project of unrelated project does not seem to add any value or save any time.
  
  Bruce Lofland
  PM Technix
  .