Work Management - 5 Strategies to Manage Multiple Projects

Work management is challenging especially when you are working on multiple projects simultaneously. Every project resides in a different phase and it is crucial to monitor and proceed in all without compromising the quality. If there is not a good process to follow, it would be cumbersome to prioritize the work and tasks of every single project. Being a project manager, it is your responsibility to effectively manage the team and workload.

In this digitally growing world, work management requires additional efforts when it comes to the marketing and brand image of a project in the market. A critical analysis is compulsory to build a smooth operational infrastructure in which resources could be utilized optimally. As per the research of 2020, the full-time US employees had an average workweek of 41.5 hours. Moreover, the COVID is also affecting the work-life of organizations that ultimately call out for a flexible working framework that assures consistent progress.

This article highlights five strategies that you can use to efficiently manage multiple projects at the same time.

Define your Plans, Goals, and Responsibilities

While managing multiple projects, you often find inconsistencies in deliverables, scattered results, and delayed updates. This is because there is no definite plan designed before. A standard workflow is always required that defines your roadmap towards achieving the maximum of a particular project. Ad-hoc work management does not pave the road to success and consequently, the investments and time get all wasted.

To fix the issues, it is critically important to make a short-term and long-term plan for every project. Conduct team meetings and communicate the processes of every project separately. Discuss goals and expectations from that project with your team and distribute responsibilities among the members of your team. As every project passes through multiple stages. From planning and research to development and implementation and finally, towards marketing, all the stages individually contribute to a successful end-product. Set quarterly objectives and share progress with your team to give wings to your project. This is how you can manage multiple projects at the same time.

Delegate Work Smartly

A project manager has endless responsibilities at a time. Instead of doing all work yourself, it is always better to delegate the work smartly. A project manager should just micro-manage the projects separately to ensure progress. When you are indulged in multiple projects and have drawn the timeline along with processes, find out the resources that better fit in for certain responsibilities. Assign the tasks to the team members efficiently and take regular updates.

By delegating the work, it would become easy for you to track all the tasks and data. Moreover, you would be able to determine the performance of every team member. This strategy would keep all the processes at work and help you combine them at the end of the day. Do the same with every project, achieve meaningful insight into each project, and deliver work before the deadline.

Designate One Place for all Projects

This is a highly effective work management strategy that gives you more hands at work. The project managers face the common issue of invisible progress and processes of the project. This means that you are lacking eye over every project that makes it hard to determine how much time a project would take to reach its completion phase. After the research and planning phase, the team gets started on the tasks. With time, you start getting documents and spreadsheets that are all scattered over your email and other channels. It becomes very overwhelming and time-consuming to randomly look-up up the documents.

To cope up with these challenges, you require a dedicated place where all the projects could be organized. First of all, customize your computer according to your requirements. You can designate separate profiles for every project that would make navigation and management easy for you. Organize the computer display by positioning the most-used apps the right way that helps you get a consolidated view of all the data at a glance. Manage multiple browsers efficiently without letting your computer slow down the performance.

You can use productivity software SmartWindows.app to make unlimited profiles, manage displays, adjust app positioning on your screen, and restoring the multiple browser tabs with just a single click. Whenever you open up a computer you would not need to manually set up everything as it consumes so much of your time and effort. Instead, restore everything through SmartWindows.app so that when you open your computer next time, everything is already arranged.

Effective Communication and Collaboration Whenever

With the increasing COVID cases all across the world, the remote working culture is a new normal. Amid this, it is crucial to convey milestones effectively to get desired outcomes. First, make sure to configure a secure communication channel for your company. Secondly, ensure streamlined communication through voice and video calls. Communicate with your teams every day regarding each project and collect updates and reports regularly.

Advice the team to collaborate every day to acknowledge their duties and tasks. With strong communication and collaboration, every member of the team would be on one page that makes progress faster. You can also integrate some work management tools that help your share the progress and status of tasks every day. This will also optimize time management and thus boost up your work productivity.

Track Progress Regularly

Some projects lag only because they are not evaluated with time. For persistent growth, the project managers should track the progress on regular basis. Take updates from every team member or from the sub-leader of the team to determine how much work is done in a day and what is remaining. When the progress over each project would be aligned, the next steps would become more clear and ultimately a path could be defined.

This will help you identify which project is consuming more time, what challenges are faced by the team, and what more effective steps could be taken to make certain projects more successful. Save your workflows using work management tools and apps to not reinvent the wheel every time and waste your energy. Simplify your approach towards work by taking advantage of technology. This will not only save your time but also contribute to enhanced growth.

To sum up, work management requires a smart approach when it comes to managing multiple projects. The nature of the project may vary but the strategy towards managing it remains the same. The use of technology for problem-solving, tracking the progress, regular communication sessions, etc. adds to productivity and helps the project meet its objectives efficiently. Tighten your reins over the work management techniques to fill up the loopholes and get consistent growth.