Multiprojecting

Johanna Rothman has written a nice article on the pitfalls of Multiprojecting. While others such as Gerald Weinberg, Jim Highsmith and Mary Poppendeick have correctly pointed out similar issues the primary thing that is missing from these discussion is why managers try to do this in the first place, and how project staff can “manage upwards” to correct or at least lessen the impact of this poor practice.

The primary reason I've seen for managers inflicting multiprojecting/tasking is that they are afraid that the employees won't have enough to do because they know that the resources needed for completing any one project are not completely ready. In once extreme case I know of a team of about 10 usually had 12 simultaneous projects assigned. Management specifically stated they needed to assign so many projects because history had shown that the project team was not always able to get answers from project stakeholders when required. Management wanted to make sure the team had something to do (i.e. weren’t wasting their time waiting). In this case management identified the problem of stakeholders not being available to answer questions, but rather than fix the problem by truly prioritizing projects, establishing project communities through chartering, or insisting that stakeholders be involved or lose their project’s place in the schedule they heap more projects on the already overloaded team.

Another common reason is that the managers think they are mitigating risk by having one team work on multiple projects simultaneously. The reasoning goes like this: “if one of these projects fail, at least some work got done on the others.” A COO I worked for at one time told me this with a straight face! In this case the team naturally self organized into smaller teams that focused on one project at a time. This approach only worked because the COO didn’t have any day-to-day oversight of the tasks worked on. This allowed the team to cope the best way they knew how. If the project manager had been assigning tasks rather than the team members self selecting tasks the story would have been very different.

Even with these two tactics for dealing with multiprojecting managers the real solution is educating your manager. Show her articles on this topic. Try to convince him to let you try working on a single project for a while and deal with the issues at a higher level (systems thinking) rather than going back to the band-aid.

Let me know your successes and your failures. Lets learn about this together rather than just commiserating together.