Multi-tasking is an essential skill in today’s corporate world, especially for project managers. You need to ensure the quality of your work. At the same time, you should be able to balance deadlines and budgets. On top of all of that, you have to practice your organizational skills to manage multiple projects.
This seems stressful when happening all at once. However, there are many ways to successfully and efficiently handle multiple tasks or projects.
Use Project Management Software
The service portfolio management platform ServiceNow is an excellent example of project management software. Technically speaking, it’s a program that enables users to handle multiple projects at once.
Portfolio management software helps you to work smart by enabling task handling, team collaboration, and file keeping. It’s an invaluable tool that gets rid of the nuances of complicated to-do lists and spreadsheets.
Prioritize
Know your priorities. Considering how a portfolio will involve several projects, it’s crucial to determine which ones to prioritize. Understanding the level of preference for each project will help you do this. Tasks and deadlines come in at different times anyway, so you can organize them accordingly.
Without the skill of prioritizing, you’ll be needlessly working at a rapid pace but still falling behind your target schedule.
Create Individual Plans for Each Project
Even though you’re managing a portfolio, it is vital to create a plan for each project. Projects can get all mixed up without proper structuring and planning. Your career is at stake if you’ll end up with a big mess of projects.
You can start creating a plan by appointing team leaders who will oversee each project and its members. In each team, members have their tasks split into different stages according to their priority. Each step has milestones that indicate how close a project is to its final goal. This is your portfolio’s plan of action.
And of course, this has to be implemented and executed. To do this, you have to apply your skills in single document management, resource management, and enforcing strict deadlines.
Delegate Tasks
You can’t create and execute a plan without learning how to delegate tasks. Those are the most important reasons why task delegation is crucial to project management. But to effectively do it, you must break tasks into smaller ones and provide your team with the information they need to complete their tasks. Be clear and very detailed with your instructions.
You should also know the ability and skills of each member so that you can assign tasks to the right persons. Take advantage of your team if you have to deliver multiple results with the same deadlines. This will help you take the pressure off from each member. But most importantly, this will give your members a sense of achievement and responsibility.
Lastly, let each team complete a task for every day of the week. You can achieve this by focusing on a single task for the day. Each team’s effort will be concentrated on finishing a job, which will give them a sense of completion at the end of the day.