Whether you are a newbie or have been a project manager in the industry for a while, you might get nervous just thinking about handling many projects simultaneously. Some companies may be backed by full-fledged project managers and teams per project; however, some might be expected to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
This is where the problem starts. Even the most qualified project manager who knows how to manage projects will find it if he needs the proper project management tools for construction that can help manage multiple projects at once.
A construction project involves a million moving parts, which makes it hard to track everything if it is still going according to plan. With an efficient and effective system for managing multiple projects, it may be easier to know what to prioritize, how to help your team manage their workload, and if everything is getting done on time.
In this article, we have listed ten easy tips on staying on track, ensuring that each project will be delivered on schedule, within budget, and of the highest quality possible.
A Construction Manager’s Dilemma in Handling More Than One Project
When a project manager handles more than one project, it means a few things: your company runs many projects, lacks resources, and divides attention among different clients and needs. While this may initially seem like a good thing – more projects equal more profits, you may lose track of things, compromising one project over the other. Even worse, project managers often have to do time-consuming administrative tasks, which adds to your list of responsibilities.
The more projects you have to work on simultaneously, you will likely feel overwhelmed. Keeping track of multiple projects is very hard if you do not have a clear overview of what is going on for every project detail. On top of that, managing numerous projects means moving resources around, and you force everyone to do heavy-duty multitasking to keep everything moving according to plan. Luckily, there are a lot of digital tools that can make construction planning management more accessible and more efficient. When working on several projects at once, you will have to deal with many changes along the way and figure out how they affect your plans.
Ten Easy Ways You Can Stay on Top of Things
When you spend a lot of time strategizing and perfecting your processes, it is even more vital to learn how to manage more than one project. You may need to have a checklist to keep track of everything. Or are you one of the people who work with software to get valuable insights on what is going on with your project? In this section, we have listed ten ways you can manage your projects – all of them – to success.
Create a Comprehensive Plan for Everything
It would help if you left little to chance when you are in charge of more than one project – you need to plan for every detail. It is essential to plan for every possible project outcome and have backup plans in case things go wrong.
You and the others on your project team will wear out your brains by switching back and forth between tasks with any plan that will serve as your project’s framework.
Define Your Project’s Goals, Plans, Responsibilities, and Expectations
Goals, plans, and responsibilities should all be made clear. Suppose your project deliverables are different from what is being constructed onsite. In that case, you need to stop and review your scope. Make sure your team’s plan, process, and roles are clear to fix this. At the project level, this means ensuring everyone knows the goals, each step, the work that needs to be done, when each is due, and who will be in charge. Your project goals should help your team reach these, and in turn, these team goals will help your company reach its goals.
Set Up a Centralized System for Your Projects
Plan and run the projects for your team by uploading data to a centralized system. This way, you and your stakeholders can access the correct information anytime and anywhere.
Let us say you are in charge of multiple projects that are ongoing construction. In that case, you will need to know precisely how many workers are on site, your current cashflows, and when each is happening. When you plan and manage all your projects in one place, you can quickly see what is going on and how your entire roadmap is doing. One of the benefits of using construction software is that it offers powerful features that are easy to use and allow people to collaborate.
Utilize The Right Tools for Your Project
Even if you think you are the most powerful leader and best project manager, you will need help at some point. An affordable construction management software can go a long, long way in helping you and your team stay on top of every project detail. Software that offers powerful management systems and automation gives you everything you need to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
With just the simple click of a button, you can do your daily business, keep track of your team’s progress, keep track of projects and the tasks assigned, and so much more. You can steer away from the time-consuming tasks quickly and see your projects more clearly – giving you more time to improve your plans and ensure you finish each project successfully.
Prioritize The Critical Parts
First, list the most important parts of each project you’re in charge of. Without this baseline, you can work hard all day and still feel like you are falling behind since you do not have something to compare with your project’s current status.
Your projects will have different priorities, and so will the tasks that make up those projects. Find out which items are critical for completion and which one has extremely tight deadlines. Then you and your team can plan your time around it.
Give Your Team the Freedom to Adjust
Get an overview of everything your team has done. Setting priorities and agreeing on work as a team is essential, but so is being able to change direction when needed. But if you keep track of your team’s work in different tools, like spreadsheets and to-do lists, it can be hard to know what they are working on at any given time.
By giving your team access to a single source of truth, you can keep track of multiple projects without worrying about changing priorities. A construction project management software lets you have a clear overview of every task at hand, so you can see which team is overloaded with work and which ones need assistance to finish the task. Because everyone’s work is out in the open, you can quickly see how busy your team is and what tasks they are working on. Then, if you need to change the order of tasks, you won’t have to worry about losing them.
Review, Evaluate and Monitor Your Plans
In an ideal world, you should keep sticking to the original plan that was agreed upon in the early stages of the project. However, there are a lot of unforeseen factors that may affect your project’s status or timelines. As a result, flexibility is one of the critical qualities a good leader must have. When you’re in charge of more than one project, several unknown factors can make you rethink everything.
A straightforward way to combat this is to keep reviewing, evaluating, and monitoring your plans to see if there are some items you need to adjust. Hold regular review meetings where you update the original method and get insights from other stakeholders. This will help you finish all your projects successfully.
Pay Close Attention to Every Small Detail
When working on more than one project at a time, you must pay more attention to the one you are doing now. As a result, you need to focus and keep a close eye on every project detail. Good software can help you achieve this by giving you an overview of every project without needing to go onsite and inspect work personally.
Close Communication and Collaboration
One of the essential parts of managing a project is fostering close communication and collaboration within the team. Many digital tools focus on making an open space where everything is shared with the team. Managing multiple projects becomes even more critical because the team can talk about possible problems and how to solve them before they cause significant delays.
Consistently Update Your Schedules
Plan each project so that it fits into your overall portfolio. Even the most carefully planned project can only go off track if it is scheduled with all of your team’s work for the month, quarter, or year. If your team tries to do too much at once, they might go against each other or take longer than expected.
