How to manage multiple projects: 3 core strategies and practical tips

Managing multiple projects is one of the most valued skills a project manager can have, but this type of work always comes with challenges. Once you're running a portfolio of projects instead of one initiative, a few problems tend to appear:

• Limited visibility. When each project lives in its own Kanban board or spreadsheet, there's no single place to check overall progress. Spotting which projects are at risk means opening each one in turn, so problems are often caught late.
• Hidden dependencies. Projects often rely on each other in ways that aren't written down. If one project's research phase overruns, a team waiting on those findings can lose a week before anyone connects the two delays.
• Team members split between projects. People working on several projects at once field requests from different managers, each with their own deadline. Without a shared view of priorities, they're left to decide for themselves which work comes first.
• Unbalanced workloads and resource conflicts. When workload isn't visible across projects, the most experienced people tend to be booked on everything. They become bottlenecks, while colleagues with capacity go underused.
• Scattered communication. Updates, approvals, and files end up spread across email threads and chats. Stakeholders struggle to find the latest version, and decisions don't always reach the people who need them.

These challenges don't reflect a lack of skill or effort. More often, they show that the volume of work has outgrown the way it's being managed. 

In this guide, we'll show you how to centralize, prioritize, and execute work across multiple projects, with examples of how teams manage their portfolios in Wrike.

In our experience, the teams that manage multiple projects most effectively rely on three key practices:

• They centralize and visualize every project in one place, so they can see how projects affect each other and where risks are building.
• They prioritize and organize work across projects, using a shared view of business goals and team capacity to decide where their time and budget should go.
• They keep execution consistent, with standard ways of taking in requests and collaborating, and connecting project work to the tools their teams already use.

These practices draw on the principles of project portfolio management, which leadership teams use to decide which projects go ahead and how resources are shared between them. 

The same thinking applies whether you oversee a formal portfolio at your company, or you're simply responsible for several concurrent projects within your team. 

Below, we look at each practice, with examples of how teams apply it in Wrike.

Most of the challenges above come from the fact that each project is being managed in isolation.

Solving those challenges almost always means moving from separate tools designed for managing a single project to a central work management platform that holds every project you're responsible for. 

Many project management tools work well for one project at a time. A Trello board, a standalone Gantt chart, or a team chat channel can each keep one project on track, but none of them shows how that project fits alongside the others.

Project management software that holds all your work puts every project, task, and team member in the same place. It becomes a single source of truth where everyone involved in delivering the project can access the information they need to complete their work efficiently.

That's what makes it possible to see where projects overlap, who's committed to what, and where a problem on one project is about to affect another.

It's easier to centralize your work if each of your projects has the same basic structure. 

With consistent statuses, fields, and naming conventions, you can compare projects side by side and roll them into a single report. 

For example, a marketing team running a product launch and a website redesign might use "In review" on one project and "Awaiting approval" on the other. 

Even though both these terms mean the same thing, they won't show up together in a report unless someone reconciles them by hand. Depending on how many projects you're managing, and how familiar you are with the way they run day to day, this can be an incredibly time-consuming process that compromises the transparency of your projects. 

With that baseline structure in place, you no longer need to open each project in turn to check on it. A single overview should show you project status, upcoming milestones, overdue tasks, and who's working on what, so you can identify at-risk projects while there's still time to respond. 

Our guide to project portfolio dashboards covers what to include in a dashboard like this, with examples for different types of teams.

Wrike's project portfolio management tools can give you the foundational structure your projects need in a few important ways: 

• Spaces and folders organize projects by team, department, or client. Custom item types (templates for different kinds of work, like campaigns or product releases) and custom fields give every project the same statuses and data, so reports compare like with like across your projects.
• Cross-tagging lets a single task sit in more than one project without being duplicated. When a deliverable is shared between projects, any update shows up in both places, which also makes dependencies between projects easier to see.
• Project dashboards pull status, deadlines, and workload from every project into one live portfolio view. You can build different dashboards for different audiences, from a detailed view for your own planning to a high-level summary for leadership.
• Multiple project views, including Gantt chart view, Kanban boards, tables, and calendars, show the same work in different formats. Each stakeholder can work in the view that suits them, while everyone draws on the same underlying data.

For example, Hootsuite uses Wrike across its marketing and creative teams. Project manager Lisa Matthews told us this: "With Wrike, I am able to track and monitor all of my projects in one place. If asked about one of my projects, I can instantly go into Wrike and give them an update within 30 seconds." 

When several projects compete for the same people, you need to set priorities across the whole workload. Without clear priorities, each team member is left to judge which task is most important, and rather than looking at what work is most urgent, their decisions are often based on whoever asked most recently.

Priorities hold up best when you tie them to business goals and agree on them with stakeholders in advance. Deciding which projects contribute most to your company's objectives gives you a clear basis for decisions when two projects need the same people.

For example, a software development team supporting several products might use agile project management, which breaks work into short, iterative cycles called sprints. The team works from a backlog, a list of all the work waiting to be scheduled, and keeps it in priority order through regular reviews known as backlog grooming. 

When stakeholders have already agreed which product goals matter most this quarter, the team can order the backlog by business value with very little debate. Each sprint then reflects those priorities, even when two products need the same developers at the same time.

Agreed priorities only work if your team has the capacity to deliver them. Resource constraints, like a limited number of specialists or a fixed budget, can quickly stretch your team, even when the plan looks achievable on paper. To keep plans realistic, it helps to:

• Compare workloads across projects. Check each person's assignments across all their projects to see where experienced team members are overbooked and where you might be able to rebalance the tasks.
• Plan by role before assigning task ownership. For example, if three client projects at an agency all need a senior designer in the same month, planning by role reveals the conflict before anyone's calendar is full.
• Map task and project dependencies on a shared timeline. When you put projects that rely on each other on the same timeline, a delay on one shows its impact on the others straight away.

Wrike's resource management tools support each of these strategies and make resource allocation easier to adjust as your priorities change:

• Workload charts track the effort assigned to each person across every project, week by week. Custom work schedules factor in working hours, non-working days, and vacations, so capacity reflects when people are actually available. Wrike's AI also flags capacity risks before they turn into delays, and you can rebalance the work.
• Job role capacity charts show future demand for each role against the hours available. Managers can check whether the assignee can take on a new project request before accepting it, so they discover any shortfalls before the work has started. 
• Gantt charts can combine several projects in one view, so you can see how their timelines overlap. Dependencies move related tasks automatically when dates shift, and you can drag task bars to adjust a timeline in seconds.
• Time tracking shows how long work actually takes across projects. Comparing actual hours with estimates makes future plans more accurate and shows where projects are using more capacity than expected.
• Dashboards keep agreed priorities and upcoming deadlines in front of everyone working across the projects. Because they update in real time, team members can check what matters most without waiting for a status meeting.

Arvig, a telecommunications and broadband provider, uses Wrike across teams from R&D to HR.

Project manager Kelly Maier says better visibility means "we can easily reallocate resources to work on different projects." Her team saves an average of around 20% of project time, across roughly 50 projects a year.

Shaun Carlson, Director of R&D and Continuous Innovation, adds, "Today, we can manage 250% more projects, which means we can be more responsive, increasing customer satisfaction."

For more insights, see our guides to resource management and project portfolio management.

When every project takes on work, shares updates, and handles approvals in its own way, you end up spending more time coordinating than managing. Information slips between email threads and chat channels, and comparing progress across projects gets harder. When you have a consistent way of working across all your projects, it's possible to remove a great deal of that friction. 

A good place to start is intake, meaning how new work reaches your team. 

A standard intake process captures the same details for every request, so projects begin with a clear scope, and you don't have to chase missing information later. 

For example, an IT team handling requests from several departments can ask every requester about deadlines, affected systems, and business impact. With the same information for every request, it's much easier to compare them and decide what to take on.

Beyond intake, you can keep delivery consistent by:

• Reusing project templates. Starting similar projects with the same phases, task list, and approval steps saves setup time and makes progress easier to compare.
• Keeping feedback and approvals with the work. When reviewers comment and sign off on the file itself, you have a clear record of what was approved and when.
• Automating routine coordination. Assigning tasks, moving work between stages, and sending deadline reminders can happen automatically, so the admin doesn't grow with every new project.
• Connecting your existing tools. Updates flow through to the systems people already use, so nobody has to switch between tools to stay informed.

In Wrike, these practices are supported by:

• Dynamic request forms, which use conditional logic to adapt their questions to each requester's answers. Based on the responses, a form can create tasks or an entire project automatically, assign an owner, and route the request to the right team.
• Approvals and online proofing, which let reviewers comment directly on files and sign off in Wrike. Conditional approvals set the right approver and due date automatically, so work doesn't stall waiting for a sign-off.
• Automation, which uses simple when/then rules to move tasks between workflow stages, adjust timelines, and send alerts when a task is at risk of overrunning its deadline or budget.
• Integrations with more than 400 tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Jira. These keep updates flowing between Wrike and the systems your teams already rely on.

Ogilvy Australia, part of the global advertising agency, uses Wrike's request forms to take in creative briefs, including from a pilot with BMW's dealer network of more than 700 offices. Steven Dunn, Senior Integrated Project Manager, says, "Production absolutely loves those forms because they capture all the relevant information." Approvals are now tracked in Wrike, and as Dunn puts it, "They can see a cohesive list of what their projects are, and where they are."

At an even larger scale, Sony Pictures Television rolled out Wrike to creative teams in the US, Latin America, and Europe, using it for online proofing and consolidated asset reviews. The company now takes 40% less time to deliver projects and has reduced emails by 90%. 

Each of the three strategies we've described here depends on having all your projects, people, and processes in one place. 

In our experience, that's why the most reliable way to manage multiple projects is with a robust project management platform that gives you a clear view across every project today and can scale as your portfolio grows. 

Without that foundation, every new project adds more manual work, from chasing updates to rebuilding reports, while visibility across the portfolio gets harder to maintain.

The practices above give you the systems for managing multiple projects. Alongside them, a few day-to-day habits help you stay in control of the work.

When you build each project plan without considering the rest of your team's ongoing work, it's easy to miss clashes. Two major launches can end up in the same week, competing for the same team members with approval authority, without anyone noticing until it's too late to rearrange the calendar.

Before you commit to new dates, check them against the milestones on every project you have to manage. It can be particularly helpful to add shared deadlines, like quarter-end reporting or a company event, to the timeline of every project they might affect.

Project-level priorities tell you which projects come first, but you still need to decide which tasks deserve your attention on any given day. 

The Eisenhower matrix is a quick way to do this. Tasks are defined by their urgency and their importance, then: 

• Urgent, important tasks are tackled immediately. 
• Non-urgent, important tasks are scheduled in the calendar. 
• Urgent, non-important tasks are delegated
• Tasks which are not important or urgent are dropped. 

Good risk management strategies and software can also be helpful. Using software to set up alerts for slipping deadlines and budget overruns, for example, means you can act on an important problem before it turns into an urgent task.

Stakeholders usually see only their own project, so they may not realize what else you're managing. Keeping them aware of your overall workload helps set realistic expectations and makes it easier to ask for help or renegotiate a deadline when you need to.

At kickoff, agree with each stakeholder group how often they'll hear from you and what should trigger an immediate update. Then raise risks as soon as you spot them. A delay flagged early is a planning problem, while one flagged late becomes an issue with project delivery.

Every switch between projects means reorienting to a different set of goals and people. This context switching adds up, and it's one of the hidden costs of managing several projects at once. 

Time blocking helps by setting aside dedicated time on your calendar for each project or type of work, and task batching groups similar work together. For example, writing all your weekly status reports in one session keeps you in the same frame of mind and can help save time.

Because projects depend on each other, a change on one often affects the others. A short monthly review across all your projects can reveal patterns you'd miss inside a single project. For example, if a vendor working on several projects makes a critical error on one, it's worth reviewing their role on the others too.

Feed the lessons from completed projects into the plans and checklists you reuse, so each new project starts from a stronger position.

When you can see your priorities across the whole workload and give your teams consistent ways of working, it becomes much easier to run multiple projects. Wrike brings these essential features together, with dashboards and workload charts that show progress and capacity across projects, and request forms, automations, and integrations that keep work moving.

As your number of projects grows, Wrike grows with you, from managing a handful of projects within a single team to enterprise project portfolio management across the organization.

To see how Wrike could help your teams manage multiple projects, book a demo or try Wrike for free.