Gaining Maximum Productivity of the Resources Who Work Simultaneously in Several Projects: Practical Recommendations

In most cases, when limited resources work on several projects at the same time, one or another project has to wait till the resources are available. It is introducing waiting times. And every time a resource jumps from one project to another, some setup time is needed.?

The waiting time is the biggest disadvantage of running multiple projects with a shared resource pool. On the other hand, this approach helps organizations to put their key resources on more than one project if their specific knowledge is required.?

I know a lot of examples when a company only has one expert in a specific area whose competence is required for all projects. In this case, the expert uses his or her knowledge for all projects and shares it with colleagues.?

In this context, I have several recommendations.?

1. Never put your key resources for one day per week on project A and another day on project B, etc.

It’s extremely inefficient because every time the working day is finished, the initiated task has to wait for a week before it will be picked up again. A task of 40 hours will then get a duration of 5 weeks. Instead, let the key resource first finish his task on project A before he jumps over to project B. But one remark: you need a good task priority mechanism for that.?

1. Don’t ever overload your resources.?

The effect of the overload is that the “ready to start” tasks can’t be initiated because of the lack of an available resource. This creates prolonged waiting times that will be extended further. People start to multi-task, and things just become even worse. Ultimately, all this causes increased stress levels, mistakes, the necessity of rework, and missed due dates.?

1. Add some float to your project plan.?

As mentioned above, one of the biggest problems of multi-project environments where resources work on several projects simultaneously, is waiting for resources. In my experience, project managers/schedulers assume that resources will be available when needed. But quite often they are stuck in other projects. The task has to wait for the resource and this is accumulating over and over again. Experienced project managers know this and they add some float to their project plans. But how much float is needed? Nobody can tell you. It depends on the resources’ load.?

Epicflow can help you resolve these challenges:

1. It has a reliable prioritization mechanism that calculates the priorities based on all real-time data and dependencies between tasks and projects. If any changes to one of the projects happen, the priorities are recalculated immediately.?
2. Epicflow helps balance resource workload and avoid overload: it assists in intelligent resource allocation and predicts bottlenecks.?
3. Epicflow measures the expected waiting times with AI-driven predictive analysis that will help you maximize your flow and deliver your multiple projects without stress.

One more tip for multi-project environments is never scatter your resources over too many projects + start your projects later to deliver them earlier. Let me put another tip with the help of an example from my practice.

Once we analyzed an IT program for a big government agency. The situation was bad: many of their projects were already in red and the most important resource group lacked 25% capacity (out of 50 people). Increasing the staff was impossible.?

With our predictive analytics feature, we forecasted the due dates of their projects.?

1. First, we asked the customer to prioritize all their projects with a business value. The predictive analytics showed that only 24% of the Prio 1 and Prio 2 projects would be delivered on time.?
2. We advised putting more resources into big tasks to reduce the lead time of the individual projects. The predictive analytics showed that in that case 56% of the Prio 1 & 2 projects could be delivered on time. Remember that if you scatter your people over too many projects you just introduce waiting times and a lot of extra setup time.
3. The last incentive was staggering based on the bottleneck, which is postponing the start date of a project in case of overload. At that, we didn’t change the original due dates at all. According to predictive analytics, 92% of the Prio 1 & 2 could be delivered on time. For all the projects, the number was 66%.?

As we’ve made sure once again in practice, sometimes it’s better to start your project later in order to deliver it earlier!

Therefore, if you take our recommendations from above you will see that you can do more projects with the same staff. Good luck!