Managing Multiple Projects: Part 1
One of my favorite things about working at CodeNoise is the ability to work on multiple projects. Variety in the types of products we work on gives me a lot of fresh new challenges that are interesting to solve. Sometimes, the process of working through problems with one product can provide helpful insight into totally unrelated products.
As with everything, variety also has its challenges. One of the operational hurdles people ask us about is how we manage to keep multiple projects on track at the same time.
Since there are many considerations, we will be posting multiple topics about this as a series. We will start with foundational basics: Stakeholder Management and Communication Standards.
Stakeholder Identification and Management
Stakeholder Identification all boils down to:
- Who are the people involved in your project?
- What do they care about in the project?
- Why do they care about it?
These answers may change throughout the project because of staffing changes or business changes within the clients’ organization — and sometimes those things change quite rapidly. Given those conditions, how should you manage your stakeholders and their expectations?
Being close to your stakeholders gives you an advantage in being able to anticipate your clients’ needs — sometimes before they even realize them. I track this information in a few ways:
- Make a list of:
- Who is involved
- Their role and stance on the project
- What type of information to share with them.
- Spend some time to get a glimpse into the mind of your stakeholders. Achieving this can be as simple as some water cooler banter that may reveal more about their personality. These interactions will often inform you how to best communicate with them and insight into what motivates them. (Oh, and making these personal connections is pretty cool, too!)
- Note any observations around organizational struggles your stakeholders have internally. These may not be objectively related to the project content itself, but chances are it will affect the project as a whole. Even though we may have little to no control as an outside party, just noting these gives helpful context about how and when to communicate to make the best of the situation while ruffling the fewest feathers.
Keeping basic stakeholder info documented makes it easier to switch context between projects. Just a quick review can get you back into the context of that client’s project.
Communication Standards
Balancing communications can be tricky during a project. If you over-communicate, everything you say may just get thrown into a pile of “too long, didn’t read” in your stakeholder’s to-do list. Under-communicating is even worse and will cause countless headaches in trying to manage expectations with your clients.
Here are a few things that help make communication a breeze:
Make A Communication Plan
Communication expectations do not form organically through a project and “just work.” Make clear how you organize the project work, how you will communicate project updates, and what you expect from your stakeholders in keeping the communication flowing. Consider the following plan components:
Standing Project Updates
Pick a time to have a regular check-in on the project with the relevant stakeholders.
- Update meetings may happen a few times a week, once a week, or another cadence that makes sense for the size of the project and availability of the attendees.
- Create a standard agenda and prepare and send a specific agenda the day before to keep the meeting on-track and productive.
- In-person updates are the most effective, but if that isn’t possible, consider a video conference over a conference call. Attendees tend to be more engaged when they know others can hear and see them.
Regularly occurring meetings will keep your finger on the pulse of what the needs are for each client. At the same time, there’s also no need for meetings with the sole purpose of having a meeting. If you and the client are on the same page for whatever reason, skip a session, and reclaim your time!
Communication Channel Guidelines
Slack messages, emails, texts, app notifications, and more are bombarding us all day, every day. The proper etiquette for when and how to use different communication tools can be confusing, and people usually have their personal preferences.
For example, I once worked with a team who had:
- One person who never checked their email
- Another who refused to use Slack
- Someone who would not use the issue tracking system because they didn’t feel comfortable using it
It took a massive amount of overhead to keep communications consistent for those who were not on board with the tools we were using, and eventually, we all had to agree on at least ONE way we would keep everyone in the loop.
When you’re managing multiple projects, you won’t have time to customize your communications for individuals. Make your expectations clear, and get buy-in from all of the team’s project members about how you will communicate.
If you’re using Slack, for example: What types of communication are appropriate for Slack? Is there other information that might be better in email format? Maybe you’re using an issue management tool that integrates with all of the above. Whatever your situation, figure out what works for your project team and reinforce proper usage techniques when misused.
Emergency Protocols
Let’s say you just launched a new service for a client, it’s 1 a.m. the following day, and there’s a 3rd party software vendor outage that is affecting the client’s business. Your client frantically calls you in the middle of the night, but your phone is on Do Not Disturb, just as you do every night to make sure you get some sleep. You wake up to angry voicemails and frantic emails.
How can this be avoided? I like to ask these questions per project:
- What is the definition of an urgent issue?
- How should the client notify you and when? What will be your turn-around time to respond?
- How and when should you notify the client if you observe an urgent issue that impacts the project?
Spend some time with your client to agree on the answers to these questions. Even if things like 3rd party outages rarely happen, when they do, they can be devastating to a business. Having a plan for what the communication protocol is in these instances will help you maintain a stable client relationships, and work through problems faster and more efficiently when they inevitably happen.
As with stakeholder management, make sure you document each client’s communication plan for reference when you’re switching between projects. For your sanity, try to set a “default” plan and stray from it only when you have to.
Stay tuned in the following weeks for our take on a few other essential aspects of managing multiple projects: Prioritization and Scope Management!