How to manage multiple projects

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Management of multiple projects at the same time is not easy. No matter if you are a business owner or a project manager. In each particular project, you need to take care of the same elements such as development, timeliness, communication, team matching, error handling and much more. In addition, it is likely that the projects managed by you will be different from each other and each of them will require a different approach and focus on other elements.

I invite you to read this post, in which we will present various ways to improve work performance when working on multiple projects at the same time.

Prioritize Your Projects

You should start your work by defining which projects are more important and which are less important. You need to decide what your priorities will be. It may be the project’s profit or the potential that the project could have in the future.

Once you identify which projects are more important than others, you will be able to dedicate more time on the higher priority ones. It will bring better results than if you spend the same amount of time on each project.

The famous Pareto principle says that 20% of the operations carried out gives 80% of the results. You need to make the same assumptions and ask yourself which projects have a higher priority to you. After identifying that, focus your energy on them!

Project roadmap

The most important element of the journey is to reach a goal. It’s important to have a plan and to know in what direction you are going. It’s the same situation as going to the mountains without a plan. It is impossible! The same rule applies to the projects. To have a plan is a must. The precise definition of a roadmap of the development of each project will let you not only keep control of the work progress but also, what is the most important, will allow you to plan a work. Only by creating a good project planning map and the direction in which the project will be developed, we may specify the calendar and define milestones for each project.

Create a Project Schedule

Once you know in which direction each of your projects is heading, the next step will be to plan the time needed to complete them. If you have already written out the key stages of the project, put a reminder on them to know when and what the team will be working on. Of course, not everything can be planned. Some stages will take longer or something unexpected will come up during the work but thanks to planning each project in time, you will have more control over verification of the progress of the work.

Use Project Management Tools

Once you have set priorities and written out your projects, you need to move all the dates to a tool you will be working in. There is ist a wide choice of tools available and you can find our recommendations of some of them in the post „Top project management tools for startups”. Which tool will be suitable for you and your team is a secondary issue. What is more important More important is to set up the programme so that it will improve your work and every team member follows the workflow you have worked out.

There are no excuses like „these are small tasks” or „it is easier to call or write”. Everything must be based on a tool that you have chosen. In that way, every team member will know what are their responsibilities, when they have to do it and on what other tasks they are working with other team members.

Communicate with Your Team

Although it’s important to stick to the generated workflow, it doesn’t mean that the team is not supposed to communicate with each other. The easiest method of communication is to use a Slack app. There are of course other alternatives but the idea is that every team can see who is in the chat room and that they can talk to others, regardless of the size of the company.

Another very important element of improving communication is the cyclical voice calls that allow you to discuss the progress, problems and upcoming work. You have to determine when and how often you need to talk.

In Streply we use the option that we call „daily”, which consists of short voice talks that last from 5 to 15 minutes every day. These conversations are held during morning coffee and do not disrupt anyone’s workday. They allow for a quick discussion of what happened yesterday and what will happen today. In addition, at each sprint, which means a major stage, it is a good idea to make a summary of the work from the previous sprint and to plan the work of the next sprint.

Take control of errors and logs

Even if you are not a technical person, you should have knowledge and control over the errors that occur in your app. This will not only allow you to develop a better software but also to analyse recurring errors and the work of programmers.

Programmers have many tools like xDebugger to help them work on their software.

However, these are tools that require technical knowledge and access to the application environment. The best solution for a project manager would be Streply that easily shows information about errors and logs from multiple applications.

Analyse how users use your projects

As a project manager, you should pay attention to error handling and analysing user behaviour in each project. It will not only allow you to build a product that meets user expectations but also to measure the progress of the project. By seeing how users use the app, you can easily determine which tasks are important, which are less important and which ones you can give up completely. It is important. Why waste time on something that is not needed and users won't use it anyway? Focus only on what is crucial to the project.

Focus on Results

Last but not least. When working on multiple projects at a same time, you need to focus only on the results that are important for each project. The more time you spend on things that are not important, the less time you will have on the important tasks. Holding a three hour team meeting or adding another 15 options may seem productive, but has it really made the project move forward? Focus on results, avoid things that will distract you and not have a good impact on the development of the project.

Conclusion

As you can see, the most important thing is good preparation and proper planning with good execution. It sounds simple, but it’s not. I hope that this article will help you to run multiple projects at the same time, but you need to develop most of the methods in such a way that they will improve your work and the work of your team, namely the selection of the right methodology, tools to support the work, division of tasks or responsibilities. What works for one company may not work for another.

And what are your tips to improve work on multiple projects at the same time? Let us know!