Project managers, freelancers, and supervisors of all sorts know how hard it can be to manage multiple projects at once. And you know how difficult it can be to manage your workflow as well as the workflow of your team members.
Keeping track of every task that needs to be done can get complicated, even for a single project. Multi-project management may feel downright overwhelming. Getting through it successfully requires time management skills, organizational skills, and extreme focus.
We provide some tips that can help you better manage multiple projects at a time.
The challenges of tracking multiple projects
Project managers have a lot of responsibilities. You might be in charge of things like:
- Determining resource allocation
- Capacity planning
- Tracking milestones
- Managing client needs
- Creating a time frame for deliverables
Let’s just say, juggling multiple projects is no walk in the park.
And that’s not even mentioning all the administrative tasks to keep track of, like managing project budgets and organizing meetings. It can seem like you’re going back and forth from project to project without making real progress on any of them.
You also have to keep your teams from getting overworked. If you have team members attached to several separate projects, it can be hard to know how much work everyone is responsible for.
To make matters worse, every time your higher-ups need a status report on a particular project, you have to stop everything you’re doing, dig into your notes or spreadsheets, and see where the project is in development.
8 Strategies to manage multiple projects
Seeing multiple projects through to their successful conclusion isn’t always easy, but it is possible with the right management skills and strategies. In the next few sections, we cover eight tips to help you keep track of all your projects effectively.
1. Make a project plan
A project plan helps you divvy up responsibilities among team members and make sure everything is clear from the get-go. Your plan should outline your project goals, deliverables, deadlines, and the responsibilities of everyone on the team.
A project management tool like Asana or Monday.com can be a great help when creating a project plan. It gives you the ability to store all your projects in one place so you’ll be able to easily access them.
When you create your plan, remember to leave space for things like feedback and approval from management. And schedule team meetings to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Designing templates for projects that your team does often can also be helpful. This will save you time from having to reinvent the wheel every time you perform a specific task. It will also make sure you do the projects the same way every time.
For example, if you work for a company that designs marketing campaigns for other businesses, you might make a project template for creating a business landing page.
2. Prioritize tasks
Not every task has the same level of importance or urgency. You can be tempted to finish easy projects first to get them out of the way, but you should always prioritize the tasks that have the highest impact on your business goals.
Let’s say one of your main business goals is to increase the conversion rate of your social media advertising. One of your tasks is to redesign the user interface (UI) on the landing pages for your ads. You estimate that it will increase your conversion rate by at least 15%.
Another task that has been assigned to your team is to redesign your Facebook ads. You estimate that the task will bring in 15% more qualified leads to your website.
Because you know that increasing your conversion rate is one of your company’s top goals, you would prioritize redesigning the UI on your landing pages.
One effective prioritization method is the Eisenhower Matrix. It divides tasks into four separate classifications. Classification one has the highest priority, while classification four has the lowest.
- Important and urgent
- Important but not urgent
- Not important but urgent
- Neither important nor urgent
3. Delegate when needed
You can’t do everything yourself. To make progress on multiple projects, you need to know how to delegate responsibilities and tasks effectively.
When you delegate a task, make sure you pick someone with the right skills to get it done efficiently. For example, if the task involves creating sales content for your company’s weekly email, you should give it to one of your team members who have copywriting experience.
Before delegating an assignment, be sure to check your project schedule to see which of your team members will have the necessary time to complete it. The last thing you want to do is overload your staff with extra responsibilities.
Resist the urge to micromanage the team member you give the job. Micromanaging defeats the purpose of handing off a task in the first place, and it can hurt your team members’ morale. Instead, empower them to make decisions to get the job done and schedule check-ins with them periodically to make sure they’re making progress.
4. Schedule work time
The best way to get work done is to give all your focus to one thing at a time. Generally, when you try to multitask, your overall productivity plummets. Major research shows that when you switch back and forth between tasks, you become less efficient and are more likely to make mistakes.
One way to ensure that your team focuses on a specific task or project is to schedule a block of time for your team to work on it exclusively.
You may even dedicate a period of work time to meet the needs of an important client. Let’s say you’re the project manager for a business consulting agency. One of your projects is to help a client streamline their work processes.
You might block off a two-hour time period in which your project team does nothing but implement integrations, like chatbots or customer forums, to automate your client’s customer service processes.
5. Use project, task, and resource calendars
Your company likely has a base calendar that outlines the general workdays and non-workdays for its core staff. A base calendar also suggests which hours employees work daily, and it defines special days your staff has off, like holidays.
For example, the base calendar might show that your core staff generally works Monday through Friday 8 am through 5 pm, and is off on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Your company’s base calendar can function as a template for project calendars, task calendars, and resource calendars. Having an accurate outline of your team members’ deadlines and likely schedules can show you things like when they might be working on a certain phase of a job, and suggest when you can be reached.
The project calendar outlines workdays and hours for a specific project. A project might require a different schedule than your business’s general working hours.
For example, to meet a client’s needs a project scheduled for Nov. 1 through Nov. 30 might require your company to work from Wednesday through Sunday instead of your company’s typical Monday-through-Friday schedule. The new schedule would be depicted on your project calendar.
A task management calendar depicts the working schedule for a specific task involved in a project. Let’s say you’ve decided to outsource a task for your November project to a remote team in another country where Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated. You could add Thanksgiving as a working day in your task calendar.
A resource management calendar can be helpful if one of the professionals working on a task has a separate schedule from the rest of the team, or if several team members are outsourced. For example, you might contract part of a task to an independent developer who works 10 am to 4 pm from Tuesday through Saturday. The calendar for the developer would depict the schedule.
You can use software tools like Microsoft Excel, Google Workspace Calendars, and Wrike Calendars to create and manage your calendars.
6. Track your progress
Keep an eye on how well your projects are progressing. Ask yourself if you’re on pace to meet both short- and long-term deadlines, and try to pinpoint any problem areas you’ve experienced with the project.
Tracking your progress can help you determine what you need to do differently going forward. For example, you might have missed opportunities to delegate work that slowed your project’s progress down. Make sure to document all your progress for each project so you can refer to it in the future.
7. Manage expectations
When it comes to project management, managing the expectations of stakeholders, team members, and clients is key. Hold meetings to check in with all the parties involved in a project and generate progress reports to share with them.
For example, you might hold monthly meetings to let stakeholders know about new developments with a project and potential events that could influence the project timeline, as well as see if their project needs have changed.
Even with your best efforts, things sometimes get in the way of your progress, especially when you’re in charge of several projects. Make sure to let your stakeholders know whenever you’re unable to get deliverables to them on time and tell them when they can be expected.
8. Communicate the ongoing progress
One of the most important aspects of project management is communication. Maintaining communication with all your team members when managing several projects at once can be a huge challenge. You need a communication system to keep everything organized.
For example, some development teams use Kanban boards as communication and collaboration tools. A Kanban board shows what development phase tasks for a project are in and how important they are.
The board is shared with project team members and stakeholders. Anyone who has access to the board can add helpful notes or information regarding each task.
Another way to encourage communication is to have regular team meetings where your staff can share problems they’ve run into and solutions they’ve come up with regarding tasks.
Maintaining communication in remote work environments can take greater effort because people aren’t working in the same physical environment. They might not even be working in the same country.
If your team has remote workers, reach out to them regularly to get status reports, answer their questions, and make them feel like part of the team.
While you can reach out to remote workers through email or chat apps, you’ll also want to schedule time to communicate with them in real-time over a platform like Zoom or Google Meet.
Live conversations reduce the risk of miscommunication between you and your team by allowing team members to get immediate clarification on anything they’re confused about.
Encourage remote staff to reach out to their fellow team members as well. Hosting online events like virtual happy hours can help remote workers feel more comfortable with each other and improve their teamwork.
Manage multiple projects the right way and get your work done efficiently
Handling multiple projects at the same time can be a major challenge. Your focus is pulled in so many different directions that it can feel impossible to zero in on a particular task.
But if you can stay organized, resist the urge to multitask, and maintain clear communication with team members and stakeholders, you’ll have a great chance of keeping up with all your projects successfully.
