The race for competitiveness and performance leads companies to work increasingly in project mode. The transversality of the latter and the versatility of skills are undeniable assets, but which do not always meet the imperatives of “at the same time”. How should companies think about multi-project management?
Your business contains a gold mine just waiting to be exploited: the strength of your teams' work. But you're missing opportunities because you're doing projects one after the other, even though there are simple methods and tools to manage a large number of projects in parallel.
A real strategic issue for companies, multi-project management addresses the problems of work overload and compliance with key dates, while being respectful of current operations. Michel Carrière, project management expert, talks to us about three essential areas of development if you want to master multi-project management within a team which must, at the same time, carry out operational activities.
Prioritize projects with higher added value
Manage a project, it’s responding to a need, a customer or even a service. In the case of a fictitious company that we will call Koodeta, we need to respond to the projects of our numerous clients at the same time as the requests of our internal departments. To respond as efficiently as possible to these orders, we have opted for prioritization. At the start of each month, we prioritize our projects based on two points: those with the best performance and those for which resources are available.
Prioritize projects
Let’s go into detail. Each project is evaluated on several criteria. The first criterion identifies mandatory, regulatory or high-priority projects. The second evaluates the financial profitability of the project. The others make it possible to judge the alignment of the project with the company's development strategy and the probability of success of the project. The criteria are up to you. Here are a few :
- how much does the project contribute to the future of Koodeta?
- how easy to make? (complexity, uncertainty, etc.)
- what are the risks for the company?
- what is the probability of success of the project?
At Koodeta we have retained these:
- do we have the human and material resources necessary to carry out the project?
- what is the scarcity on the market of the resources required to carry out the project?
- what is the operating cost of the project deliverables for Koodeta?
- what is the rate of increase in Koodeta performance? (For internal projects)
- how many customers or market shares does the project allow us to gain?
In this way, projects are evaluated against business expectations.
Once all the projects have been evaluated, we order the list by positioning the priority projects at the top, followed by the best rated in descending order of interest.
Track key resources
The second point consists of collecting, for each project, resource consumption forecasts for the month: financial, design office, etc. We only monitor so-called “live” resource types. At Koodeta they are the architects of the design office. This information is included in our project list.
Launch the right projects at the right times
At the start of each month, we go down this list, starting with the priority projects. We authorize a launch provided that we have the capacity to realize all the key resources tracked. And after each authorization, the availability of these resources is updated with the quantities that have just been committed. We repeat this process as long as we have sufficient quantities of all the key resources tracked.
This process guarantees that the projects launched are the priority and most interesting ones.. And as we do not exceed our capacity to achieve, we increase the probability of respecting our commitments and the satisfaction of our customers.
What about projects that are not launched this month? They are on the list of those to be processed the following month. As we are completely transparent about our management process, our clients know and understand the reasons for our decisions.
Optimize resource usage
Another problem then arises in multi-project management: all members of our team produce project deliverables, at the same time as they work on daily tasks in their department.
The chosen tool (MSProject server, Oracle e Business suite, Orchestra, etc.) necessarily needs detailed and up-to-date load plans. To do this, we connect it to team members' calendars to retrieve attendance information. And so as not to drown ourselves in managing details, we have chosen the quarter day as the basis for calculating employees' working hours. We have integrated BAU (Business As Usual) activities and current project tasks into the tool. I'll let you imagine the costs and time spent to set up this tool and train the team.
As a result, we abandoned this idea for two reasons:
- implementation requires a high level of detail on project planning
- updating data in the tool generated a workload disproportionate to our human resources.
This attempt highlighted two important points:
- our company is not ready for this level of organization;
- the size of the team does not require the implementation of such a detailed activity monitoring and control tool.
Above all a problem of availability
We therefore had to analyze the pitfalls of our attempt. This led us to consider Koodeta's real capabilities and needs. We then chose a less technological and less precise solution, but which is perhaps more suitable to the needs of our ETI (mid-sized company) service.
It seemed more logical to us not to penalize the company's current tasks, which is why we asked each employee what their estimate was of the time spent per week on recurring activities. We then deduced the quantity of work available per week for the projects: 20%, 40%, 60%… We used this ratio as a moderator of the monthly implementation capacity of project resources in the prioritization table.
This allowed us to consider more realistic, although macroscopic, load plans. And at the same time to become aware of the skills most in demand. This led to the hiring of an engineer to strengthen the design office.
Regarding the multi-project planning tool. We may reconsider its implementation. This will depend on our growth. But initially, given the size of our company, this macroscopic approach meets our need for organization.
Accelerate the delivery rate
Our multi-project management system has been running for a year. A new type of project is being prioritized. The need is clearly expressed and we have all the resources and skills required to achieve it. The problem is that it is big and we are hesitant to launch it as is because team leaders lack visibility into the availability of employees and material resources beyond three months.
Two solutions are available to us. The first is respectful of other projects: the project is placed in the pipe (in the process). We then hope that current projects will not encounter problems and that no emergency will slow down the work of the teams so that they are completed quickly.
The second possibility is to force fate: we put the project on top of the pile. In this case, we stop all current projects and we no longer respond to operational requests. We are focusing our work on this project.
Either solution has advantages and disadvantages by penalizing the rest of the tasks and projects in progress.
This idea does not suit everyone, we considered a third, more balanced solution.
Sequencing, the key to success
First, we break the project into smaller phases in terms of amount of work invested and duration. Then, using our prioritization tool, we modified our organization to authorize the launch of phases to replace projects. The blocks of deliverables and tasks launched being smaller, we have an easier time carrying out more projects in parallel, interspersed with operational activities.
And this last technique allowed us to identify similar deliverables between several projects and achieve them in a unique way.
Read also: Why and how to close a project effectively?
In conclusion, multi-project management is a simple management method to implement, which allows us to more easily meet the delivery commitments of numerous projects, while ensuring operational activities and creating a healthy and peaceful working atmosphere. These methods adapt to the business context: they rely on technological tools for large companies, but they can be implemented with a spreadsheet or a flipchart-style visual display for simpler contexts.
