Multi-Project Management: All You Should Know About

Multi-Project Management Core

The essence of multi-project management is a multi-tasking environment. Every task should be tackled as a part of a certain project to make it completed. But when you have to finish several independent projects by the deadline, there’s a question: what task of what project should you solve first, second, and so on? Often tasks within a project are interrelated, which means that you can’t resolve one project’s issue, then leave it and deal with another project’s challenge because inactivity will destroy the first project. This fact gives us an idea of multi-project management complexity.

Multi-Project Management Complexity 

When you have many projects consisting of hundreds or thousands of tasks to manage at a time, there’re a number of challenges, such as:

• Adequate communication
• Proper resource allocation 
• Efficient tasks prioritization 
• Appropriate scheduling 
• Rational predicting 
• Reasonable risk management

Along with that, you may have the following problems when working in a multi-project environment:

• Inadequate communication
• Overload
• Time limitations 
• Budget issues
• Ambiguity 
• Human-factor aspects 

These problems are rather difficult to resolve if you have no clean-cut scheme of how to do it. 

And besides, even if you address all these challenges successfully, unpredicted things can also happen: either global economic transformations or a human factor issue.

The Wellington survey on the state of project management in 2019 has shown that 

• 34.5% of the respondents complain that projects are hardly finished on time, 
• 40% of the surveyed note that projects are never completed on budget, 
• 37% of the respondents state that the expected level of revenue is never received.  

According to PMI research, when there’s a lack of proper project management, companies lose $122 million for every $1 billion invested.

So what can you do to avoid or resolve all these challenges and threats? There must be some tips to make the management process in the multi-project environment easier and more effective. What are they?

Multi-Project Management Tips

The first thing you should do when starting to work with multi-project management is to choose a methodology. The methodology is a set of methods and rules to be guided by in a particular kind of activity.      

The most popular PM methodologies re as follows:

• Agile 
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Critical Chain
• Critical Path
• Waterfall
• Six Sigma
• Hybrid