How to juggle multiple projects and still be organised with Industry Box

What is the hardest part in juggling multiple projects? Not missing the slightest move. The moment you miss a single task deadline, your tightly but perfectly choreographed work schedule goes into disarray and other deadlines will also drop. Or you put in 10x efforts to get back in form, at the cost of your work-life balance.

As an experienced professional, you know this well, and must have built up a toolkit of skills and preferred digital tools that maximises the number of projects you could juggle at any time (if you are leading a project, see these articles on how to engage work-from-home stakeholders from kick-off and the essential remote-working tools you may not know) . 

At Industry Box, we believe you could juggle even more projects, simply by adding Industry Box into your toolkit. And it may even replace some of your existing "it-works-but-not-that-well" tools. Let's read on.

Your project-juggling bottleneck is at staying connected with the projects

You are as productive as a project allows you to be. It doesn't matter whether you are an executive sponsor guiding multiple projects, a programme director or a subject matter expert. And it doesn't matter whether you are leading a project, or participating as a stakeholder/contributor.

When a project develops enters a into new situation, it will require input from its core team and extended team of stakeholders. If you have what it requires, you need to be informed and prepare for contribution.

If you are not well connected with the project - not having relevant and accurate information, understanding the project's intricacies (i.e. hidden contexts which are not obvious but important), or completing this preparatory process quickly, you couldn't make your contribution efficiently to meet deadlines.

And it's not just about you staying connected with the project. Rarely do you contribute to a project alone - you will team up with fellow stakeholders and the core team to discuss, workshop and evaluate. If they also struggle to stay connected, the collective team will spend more time preparing, or make contributions without full information. This leads to missed deadlines and re-work, both of which are undesirable.

Maintain good connection with the project's development and keep it efficient with only relevant information, and you will suddenly become manifold more organised and ready to contribute in multiple projects.

The classic communication tools in your toolkit are too noisy to connect you with projects

There is an abundance of tools in the market, and you definitely have some of the most popular and best in your bag. Emails, conference call, instant chat (Slack, MS Teams or even Whatsapp), work management platforms (Asana, Monday.com, Wrike) corporate social channels (Yammer, Facebook Work). Just to list a few.

They are all good, and have their place in your ways of work. They emphasise a lot on moving colleague interaction online, the kind of 2-way communication traditionally done in office face-to-face. They are extremely suited to conversations, debates and rapidly building on one another's thoughts.

But these well-intentioned interactions generate too much noise for maintaining project connection. You need a quiet place to absorb the latest real project situation, before interacting with other stakeholders and the core team to make your contribution. Don't jump the gun. 

When 2-way communication happens at the same time as the project situation being distributed, your absorption efforts are interrupted by incoming responses, and the real message is corrupted by other stakeholders' addendum.

You now have to go through the entire conversation chain to filter out personal opinions and add in patch-up information from Q&A. Then you have a tentative picture of the real project situation, but you can't be sure. It drains your time and energy, but you are still on shaky ground to work on the project.

Industry Box gives you a clean connection to projects like reading news articles

Industry Box is a work news channel. The project team creates a project space on Industry Box, sets up a channel for each workstream, and add relevant stakeholders to each channel as subscribers. The project team can then publish project development posts on each channel, tailoring the information and context for its readership. Just like categorised news articles.

To you as a stakeholders, you will subscribe to the relevant channels, and see the tailored posts. You won't miss out on important information, and also won't waste time on irrelevant posts. Most importantly, the posts are not corrupted or interrupted by comments or responses. Information are presented as the project team intended, just like succinct online news articles. 

When you have read the posts and understood the latest real project situation, you can then jump onto the classic tools to start or join 2-way communications, and work productively with full information and confidence.

Transitioning the project team from emails and meetings to Industry Box is easy

You may not be the project lead who decides what communication tools the project team should use. But that is a red herring. You don't need the entire project team communication to move to Industry Box, just the portion relevant to the workstreams you belong to. We have written a 3-step practical guide separately. 

The crux is to work with the project team to push communication at workstream level instead of all-hands or individual levels, so that all workstream members see the same information and can start co-ordinating efficiently. At workstream level, Industry Box is more scalable and effective than emails, conference calls and instant chats.

Start by asking the project team to move the next update email to Industry Box, or dice up the next presentation deck into a number of posts tailored to each workstream. As they prepare the first Industry Box posts, ensure the workstream are set up as channels on Industry Box and all the stakeholders are added as channel subscribers. Then check that the information and narrative of the posts fit with the workstreams' needs. Then press the "publish" button, and the transition is made.

Transitioning other stakeholders to Industry Box is even easier

You have worked with the project team to use Industry Box to publish project updates at workstream level. Well done. Working with stakeholders in your workstreams is easier.

Yes, the stakeholders need an account to see the posts on the Industry Box portal. But they don't need to go to the portal to see the posts on their channels. You can add them as subscribers with their work email addresses. Industry Box has a special feature called "Daily Digest". At the end of each working day, Industry Box would automatically collate all new posts on the stakeholder's channels into one email, and send to their work email. Neatly arranged by project and channel

The next morning, your stakeholders can read all the posts, decide which ones to prioritise, and start their day ready to work on her projects. Industry Box organises their project information to raise productivity, without them having to make any preparation.

When Industry Box is in your toolkit, you stay organised in multiple projects whether as leader, stakeholder or contributor

Industry Box gets you clarity on a project's latest real situation as a stakeholder/contributor, and helps you keep your core project team and extended team of stakeholders always-connected as a project lead. 

Aside from the Daily Digest feature that helps stakeholders organise across projects and workstreams, Industry Box also has user analytics for project leads to see which stakeholders and workstreams are disengaged, and prioritise efforts to bring them back on track. 

Industry Box has many more features and system designs solely to help you juggle multiple projects, stay organised and be super productive at work. By staying efficiently connected as a leader, a stakeholder or a contributor.  

About Industry Box:

Industry Box is dedicated to introducing streamlined & frictionless stakeholder management, as we believe this to be a hidden productivity blackhole for most companies and managers.

Apart from raising awareness about this issue and promoting industry best practice, we have also designed a digital tool with all the best practices built in, so that managers & leaders can introduce and benefit from best-in-class stakeholder management without the learning curve.   

See here for our other blog articles on raising productivity through better stakeholder management, or by becoming a more productivity-conscious stakeholder.