Leave a Comment / Management, Project management, timeghost / By Tim Lauenroth
Multi-project management — an area, where you can easily lose the overview as a project manager. You need solutions that map a functioning process, inform you about the capacities and workload of your team and, above all, prioritize which projects are currently important. In today’s blog entry, we give you 4 tips on how to increase the productivity of you as a multi-project manager and your team.
1. Right priotization in multi-project management
There is one crucial question you can use to help you prioritize your projects:
What is the impact of which project?
Base the timing of your projects on the impact they have on the success of your business or team. The greater the impact, the higher the priority, the sooner I implement the project!
The difficulty in prioritizing projects is to distinguish simple projects from those that have the greatest impact. Most of the time, it’s not the simple projects that have the greatest effect. So if you deal with the easy projects first, you will be much more ineffective than if you deal with the most important tasks first. That’s why it’s one of the most important issues you should address in multi-project management. With proper prioritization, you give your team the critical direction to succeed in managing multiple projects.
Try to prioritize your tasks within the projects as well as your projects themselves. This will help you get more focused on the goals of your team and the company.
Within the team, to-do lists have a great impact. You can apply the ABCD matrix to the to-do lists, which will help you prioritize your tasks by urgency.
2. Track your working hours and assign them to projects
Keeping track of your working hours and tasks in different projects solves the problem of not having an overview. With a project time tracking tool like timeghost, you have the overview you need to manage your parallel projects. With timeghost, we offer a project time tracking tool that you can integrate directly into the Microsoft365 environment.
In addition to the integration in Microsoft365, especially in MicrosoftTeams, our software stands out for its simple and self-explanatory interface. In timeghost you can easily create projects and tasks and individualize them according to your needs (set hourly rates, create budgets, assign employees to projects, etc.). With different filters in the dashboard you can display your projects the way you want. This gives you a great basis to make adjustments and get a LIVE overview of the status of your projects and the workload of your employees.
3. Create flexibility for changes and adjustments on purpose
Besides the right prioritization of projects, the ability to adapt to upcoming changes and maintain a certain flexibility in multi-project management is at least as important. To this end, it is best to create a general overview of the tasks of the team members in the various projects in order to be able to make adjustments. With a central administration of your projects you can always change the priorities without losing the overview.
4. Communication
In order to successfully implement projects, communication is one of the crucial factors for success in multi-project management. Above all, it is about being able to put yourself in the shoes of the team members and to be informed about their current tasks or projects. It often happens that team members don’t know exactly what each other is working on.This makes it unclear to you why the project is taking longer, for example. By having a real-time status on each person’s progress and regular communication with each other, you can adjust priorities accordingly to realign your team and get them back on track.
Here are three questions you can ask to immediately ensure more transparent sharing on your team:
1. What is currently your biggest challenge in the project?
2. How can the team support you in your work?
3. How can I support you with your tasks?
In summary, here are the most important tips filtered out again:
- Proper prioritization of projects determines the success of the team
- By recording the working hours of you and your team in timeghost, you have an optimal basis to adjust and make decisions
- Create a central overview of your upcoming projects
- Good and transparent communication is a key factor for successful multi-project management
- Regularly approach your employees and talk to them about their current challenges and align them with your goals
14 day free trail
Test timeghost with our 14 day free trail to see if our software fits into your company.
Give us feedback
We really appreciate all the feedback we can get, so please feel free to contact us and tell us what needs improvement or what you are missing in timeghost.
If you need any help in setting up timeghost, please don’t hesitate to visit our Support Center or send us an email to support@timeghost.io.
Get the timeghost Teams App
You only need to install the timeghost Teams App directly from the AppSource Store in the application. You can find a manual on how to do this right here. The app includes all features that you know from the web client and since you use your Office 365 account in order to access timeghost you’re set and done in only a few seconds.
