9 Strategies You Should Know to Manage Multiple Projects Successfully
If you are a manager or the leader of a team or a project, you are probably responsible for more than one project at once. However, staying on track and following all the progress of each of those projects can be complicated and stressful. Therefore, without good project management, which can keep track of multiple projects, it will be very complex for you to know which work should be prioritized first, how you can assist the team members, and organize the workflow management.
You don’t have to panic as there is a way to manage all these details successfully! For example, suppose you are having a hard time organizing and conducting project management and team management when working on multiple projects, or you want to improve the workflow by ensuring that team members can surmount the assigned tasks. In that case, using Asana and implementing these nine strategies will help you to have better project management.
1) Choose a Platform That Will Ensure You Can Lead and Manage All Your Projects Under One Roof
To avoid not being able to track all your projects in sync, choose a platform that will allow you to manage and plan your multiple projects from the same place, like Asana.
For instance, if you are the leader of a product roadmap with several products that will be launched, you will need to know the number of launches and their requirements. By choosing and using a platform that will allow you to conduct project management from one place like Asana, you can directly see the work progress and what has been done alongside what is missing.
By choosing the project management tool Asana, you can manage and plan multiple projects fluently. At Asana, we offer you an easy system to ease your project planning and management.
2) Decide on Your Expectations, Make Plans, and Define Goals and Responsibilities Before Starting Working
To not face any problems like realizing the deliverables and processes are not consistent, you should clearly understand the defined goals, plans, and responsibilities.
If you don’t have workflow management planned, all of the projects you have in hand will likely be managed differently. This situation can lead you to waste your time and not be able to keep track of all the things appropriately. It can even result in your project being inconsistent and of less quality.
To fix this kind of problem, you need to ensure that all the processes, responsibilities, and goals have been defined clearly. Then, using Asana’s templates and features, you can design a proper project and workflow management, and team members can be aware of what should be done in each project and project level initially. Alongside knowing who will be responsible for which part and when are the deadlines for each task.
3) Decide which project or work could bring the most benefit and impact if prioritized
If you don’t want to end up in a situation where you are unsure which project should be prioritized for your team, you should check your company’s goals and decide which project or work will impact your company.
Although it may seem easier to continue with a project that requires less work, your focus should always be on the company goals to understand what project needs to be completed first, despite its size or its responsibilities.
By using the portfolios feature in Asana, you can manage multiple projects while not wasting your time and managing your sources correctly. Also, Asana will let you quickly boost your productivity and keep track of your prioritizations based on your company goals!
4) Make sure that your team can adapt when there are changes in priorities
There may be times your team members cannot track the shifts in priorities or the assigned works. In such times you can use Asana to control and observe all your team members’ work, and therefore, they can better stay on track.
As much as setting up the priorities and acting accordingly is essential, being flexible to changes and still being able to continue with systematic workflow management also holds great importance.
If you don’t have a change control process, when there is a change of plans, you will not be able to see how busy your team members are or what they need to reschedule. To not lose track of the teams’ progress, with Asana, you can always be in touch with each other, be aware of everyone’s ongoing tasks, reschedule priorities, and keep the workflow management fluent.
5) Discuss the expectations and always stay in touch by communicating
In general, a lack of communication between team members is because they are not aware or informed about each other’s tasks, progress, and needs. When a team member does not have the opportunity to check and observe the whole project management and the workflow, they cannot understand or adapt to the shifting timelines and the context.
But you don’t have to worry about such things with Asana. Asana allows you to see real-time updates and understand how the work is progressing across the team, share status and progress updates constantly, and manage communication when real work happens.
6) Check required works across the project and from the team members to balance workloads
If you are unaware of how much work has been assigned to each team member or how heavy or slight their workload is, you may face problems like missed deadlines corrupting your workflow.
To ensure you won’t face an issue like this, you can use Asana. Asana will directly make you see the employee workloads amongst the projects.
Being able to manage multiple projects under one roof will let you observe and control all the tasks in each project, the individuals responsible for them, and the given/due dates. Therefore, you will detect the overbooked employees and project timeline conflicts right ahead.
7) Plan and coordinate project schedules to increase productivity
The team members can get overbooked or lose concentration and cause a delay in the workflow when you don’t have planned and adjusted project management which indicates the starting and finishing dates.
Not having a schedule with the full scope of your team’s work overall can easily lead to conflicting projects in which your team members can delay their tasks or miss the deadlines. This kind of scenario would result in a heavy workload, directly affecting your project management and team management.
To get ahead of this kind of problem, you should schedule and coordinate your team’s work while keeping in mind all the assigned tasks. Using Asana’s portfolio feature lets you know when to reschedule the project’s start date, look out for dependencies, and flag the duplicating tasks your team members have.
8) Be able to check the work in progress when you need to as the project manager
Surely you wouldn’t prefer to be a micromanager that stresses out the team; however, you should see the work progress and how each team member is doing when you need to.
To be an effective leader/project manager, you can use Asana as the single source of truth. Asana, being a living and dynamic platform designed for project management, will let you observe what everyone is doing, when their tasks are due and how they improve themselves.
9) Don’t waste your time on the next project and save your workflows
By structuring the general planning process and creating a workflow template you can use in the following projects, you will not have to worry about setting up the work each time.
Preparing a template on Asana will ensure you already know the initial components and can coordinate a new project without stressing out about how you should reinvent workflow management all over again.
