Unleashing your leadership potential for breakthrough results

By definition, projects have a limited life: they all have a deadline, even long-term ones. Managing any project can be tricky. Your job as the leader is to ensure each moving part is working towards a common goal and diminish, if not completely eliminate the unnecessary processes that merely waste resources.

Delegation is a necessity and in order to be an effective manager, you need to understand the project inside out and from different perspectives, i.e., from the perspectives of your team members because this is how you gain their respect and loyalty. 

This being the case, it is fair to say that managing multiple projects across different teams, all at once, is exponentially trickier. But it can be done and has been done. We list five things on how to manage effectively multiple projects simultaneously.

Efficient collaboration 

Before starting a project, you should have first identified the members that will constitute each team, based on their skills and availability. Conduct an initial meeting so you can discuss the appropriate courses of action to achieve individual and team goals. If you already have a clear idea of the best path to tackle, you can start 
assigning tasks. 

Remember though that simply doling out assignments can come off as demanding and may result in a less involved team. To boost morale and effectively lead the direction of a project, you can do two things during the meeting: (1) Present how you envision to accomplish the project, (2) Allow for feedback from team members, taking into account their specific viewpoints, e.g., from a design viewpoint, from a developer’s viewpoint.

After the planning stages, set time aside for regular meetings for the teams to touch base. This helps everyone visualize how their individual contributions become part of the bigger picture. A meeting also becomes the perfect avenue for conversations, affording team members a clearer picture into how their aspects of the project affect each other. 

You have to keep in mind, that as you are managing multiple projects, through efficient collaboration you will be able to not only keep yourself on track but this will also greatly help your team.

Formulate a clear plan for each project

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” so says an old adage. Another worthy agenda of the initial meeting – and the subsequent ones, for that matter – is to devise a plan of action for each team member. Ask team members to conduct a task analysis of their assignments. That is, have them split their tasks into stages and each stage into mini tasks or milestones that take them closer and closer to their final goal. 

Next, appoint team leaders or project overseers and equip them with decision-making capabilities to help you manage teams and projects. 

After you’ve formulated a definitive plan, next comes the execution. The following items are vital to efficiently execute your plans: (1) Resource management; (2) Strict deadlines; (3) Single document management.

While managing multiple projects it is important to have a clear plan for each project. Without a clear plan all projects can mix into one and you will end up with one big mess without a structure.

Allocate resources appropriately 

In anything, project management in particular, it’s essential to identify your must-haves and cut down to the essentials. Planning the deployment of your resources is just as important, as well as keeping track of how each resource is deployed. Your resources are your people, the tools they need to execute their assigned tasks to the best of their abilities, the budget to acquire, maintain and keep their tools in tip-top shape and, lest it be forgotten, time, which brings us to the next item.

Stick to strict deadlines

Deadlines often evoke a sense of dread in people. Just by its name, it stirs our most primal fear. But setting deadlines and adhering to them is how you effectively manage your teams’ outputs. To do this, create a task tracker where each member inputs their respective task analyses, including the dates they expect to complete them, which they can subsequently update to signify whether the task is on track, overdue or done. 

This helps you get a bird’s eye view, as well as a more detailed account, of what’s gone on, what’s going on and what should be going on for each project you spearhead. This is especially crucial while you are managing multiple projects, so that if you see that a deadline is not achievable you will adjust all projects accordingly rather than just one.

Single document management 

Whether they’re the project plans, resource allocation reports or the trackers you maintain to keep abreast of everyone’s progress, managing multiple documents in a single hub is crucial to keeping important data from getting lost because of one user’s carelessness. There are a number of document management software offerings in the market, some free and some that will set you back a pretty penny. Most of these software work across mobile and desktop platforms. 

Sense of shared accountability

As project leader, you’re accountable for ensuring that your project is a success; the ultimate responsibility lies with you! The members of your project team probably expect you to:

(1) Hold all team members accountable for taking the actions they’re expected to take.

(2) Run project meetings effectively.

(3) Sort out any disagreements or tensions between team members.

And that’s just for a start

But not every last aspect of team performance is down to you alone. Some members of your project team may think that they don’t have any responsibility for how the team members work together – that is, for the team process and expect you to be responsible and accountable for every single aspect of the project. In such a situation, a team member is likely to ‘pass the buck’ to you, for example, to speak to a team member who isn’t completing a task as expected. You may find yourself being dragged into sorting out problems that you think you shouldn’t be involved in because team members can’t sort out such problems themselves.

Encourage team members

Your starting point for encouraging team members to hold themselves and each other accountable for taking action is to ensure that all team members know what’s expected of them and each other to complete the project. In other words, they need to know and shoulder their fair share of responsibility.
Members of your project team probably expect you to take the lead in looking after the team process – how well team members work together – but in fact they need to share in this task.

Encourage team members to show leadership in contributing to sustaining and improving the team process by:

(1) Show a genuine interest in each other as individuals instead of only being interested in what their colleagues can do to help them complete their project work. 

(2) Step outside of their comfort zone to question and challenge any team member who’s not behaving in accord with the agreed team values.

(3) Develop the courage to ‘speak their mind’.

(4) Be able to cope with embarrassing and threatening situations. 

(5) Approach each other directly to enquire why a task they’re dependent on being completed to do their own work hasn’t been done and encouraging their colleague to complete it.

If you encourage the members of your project team to show leadership in this way, they will promptly resolve their own problems and concerns about how other team members are working with them.

(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired corporate director counting three decades of senior management experience. He is now an independent consultant and a freelance journalist. He may be contacted on [email protected])