CHAPTER 6

How to Schedule Multiple Projects

“The basic problem I have is how to schedule the few people I have in the most efficient way to get all the work done,” Patrick continued. “I can get any single project accomplished, no problem. But when I look at the mass of projects I need to get done in my department each year, I need to know how to schedule and plan the multiple project work effectively.

“Another key issue for me is priorities. Not all of the jobs you get have the same priority. Some have to be done, no fail. Others are important, but not at the same level. In the confusion and stress of trying to get it all done, sometimes you have a conflict with our priorities. This isn’t too important, but it’s easy and, besides, we’re almost done. That is very important but difficult and far off in the future. And even worse, this one was vital, now it’s optional, while that one used to be optional, and it’s suddenly vital!”

Managing multiple independent project portfolios offers a variety of challenges. There is a strategy for managing them that builds on the single project management tools you have just covered.

DEFINITIONS

Here are the key terms you will need to know for this chapter.

Time-fixed projects are projects that have a fixed deadline. Time is always the driver.

Time-variable projects are projects with flexible deadlines. Either budget or performance criteria are the driver.

The least resource is the resource of which you have the smallest available quantity. When you schedule multiple resources across multiple projects, you may not have the same quantity of each resource.

SCHEDULING ISSUES FOR AN INDEPENDENT PROJECT PORTFOLIO

In putting together an effective plan for managing multiple projects in an independent project portfolio, a fondness for jigsaw puzzles helps. You have to fit the pieces carefully. It can get frustrating since you do not always have a picture on the box to follow.

Even though part of putting together a jigsaw puzzle is endless trial and error, you can apply strategies to make the job easier. For example, build the edge of the puzzle first. In scheduling for an independent project portfolio, you follow strategies to make the job easier, but the final elements require trial and error on your part.

Look at the strategic process for laying out your portfolio. There are five major steps to planning multiple projects.

1. Lay out time-fixed projects first.
2. Determine and schedule resource requirements.
3. Identify available resources for remaining projects.
4. Use least-resource scheduling to optimize production.
5. Fit the final schedule together.

Lay Out Time-Fixed Projects First

Patrick’s production schedule involves a monthly magazine, a quarterly journal, three annual surveys, an annual meeting program, books, brochures, and special publications. The magazine, journal, annual surveys, and meeting programs are time-fixed projects, which means that time is their driver. Patrick must schedule these projects first, then fit the remaining work around the schedule.

A Note about Priority. Time-fixed projects must be done on time or not at all. Take a close look at the value and importance of your time-fixed projects. In some cases, the best strategy may be to cancel them altogether. If that is not appropriate, continue with the process described in this chapter.

One issue of the monthly magazine has already been scheduled. Now what happens when you copy that into a schedule for an entire calendar quarter? (See Figure 6.1.)

Summaries and milestones. The Gantt chart in Figure 6.1 was produced using a computer program, Microsoft Project in this case. You will notice a new symbol, called a summary bar, which is a long black bar with inverse triangles at each end (see Figure 6.2).

Remember that you can manage multiple projects using single project techniques, because a project is a task, and a task is a project. The summary bar shows multiple projects in the same Gantt chart, with the tasks within each project shown underneath it.

The other symbol introduced in Figure 6.1 is the diamond (♦), called a milestone. A milestone is a task that takes zero time to complete. Start issue, Task 2 on the schedule, is a milestone. Milestones are located wherever they help clarify a schedule. Important checkpoints and events usually deserve a milestone.

Using computer software can also show you the projects together on the same chart (see Figure 6.3). You may also do this on a magnetic scheduling board, graph paper, or anywhere else you would display a Gantt chart of all your projects.

Determine and Schedule Resource Requirements

Once you have all the time-fixed projects in your schedule, go through a staff-assignment process identical to the one followed for a single project. You have the option to do this manually or by computer. The resource Gantt charts in figures 6.4–6.8 were created on the computer. You will notice that on the portfolio Gantt chart, there is a resource name assignment for each task. (The numbers in brackets, e.g., Rod [0.25], denotes a part-time job. Rod works one-quarter time on that task during that period.)

Expect some trial and error in this process. For the sample publishing project, first assign the jobs to people on our team for a single issue of the magazine, and then duplicate the assignments for the other issues. You will see that this will not work because the time to produce each issue is more than a month. To distribute the issues on time, you will have to overlap the schedule, which creates staff conflicts—periods of resource overload. Consider several possibilities of leveling and reassigning. Finally, settle on having your two editors, Kelly and Justin, alternate issues.

Fitting in the first quarter issue of the research journal is even more challenging. One advantage you have is that the task, Receive reviewer comments, is a lag activity—no work is involved. Still, you will have to assign the editorial responsibility to Patrick, the department head, to schedule the work.

Once all the tasks are assigned, you may produce resource Gantt charts for each member of the team (see figures 6.4–6.8).

Identify Available Resources for Remaining Projects

When you examine the individual resource Gantt charts, it is obvious that doing our three monthly issues and one quarterly journal is not a full-time commitment for the department. You can do more work. The question is, how much more?

Resource Gantt charts. You may answer this question by creating resource time charts, either using a project management software package or working manually. You calculated resource requirements in Chapter 5. The program prints out a resource time chart listing project and task commitments for each person for each work day in the quarter (see Figure 6.9).

Remember, our work team consists of:

Patrick, department head and backup editor, forty hours per week availability

Kelly, editor, forty hours per week availability

Justin, editor, forty hours per week availability

Rod, graphic designer, forty hours per week availability

two staff members, desktop publishing (DTP), eighty hours per week availability.

Time availability grid. A time availability grid shows the noncommitted time for each member of our team each week, and totals the hours at the bottom of the page. To make the grid, simply add the number of unscheduled hours in each week on the resource time chart.

Kelly has 356 available hours (a little less than nine weeks); Justin has 472 hours (nearly twelve weeks); Rod has 394 hours (nearly ten weeks); DTP has 928 hours (slightly over twenty-three weeks); and Patrick has 340 hours (a little over eight weeks).

Strategic reserve time. Staff members have to allow time for administrative duties first. Assume that this averages two hours a week for everyone but Patrick. For Patrick, it averages sixteen hours a week, and if he does not have sixteen hours available in one week, it rolls into next week. With the exception of Patrick, team members are available forty-two hours a week. This is close enough. When you allocate someone five days to do a job, you assume that they will not be working every minute of every day on the project. With personal time-management skills, the team should be able to handle slight excess without a problem.

Second, the schedule as drawn makes no allowance for things going wrong. Allow four hours a week for catch-up time. Since there are not four available hours in every week, you will save it and add it later.

Tip! When scheduling limited people across multiple projects, add formal catch-up time to their schedules. If you do not, anything that goes wrong, whether it is the fault of the team member or not, bumps every subsequent task of that team member. This can quickly spiral into disaster.

Next, make allowance for those pesky special projects that management keeps putting into our schedule (see the introduction to Patrick’s problem). How do you figure what is a safe allowance? In this case, you would turn to historical data. On average, how many of these special projects materialize in a quarter? How long do they take? You will see that you have built a special project allowance into everyone’s schedule except Patrick’s. As department head, he already has enough to do.

When you take the total of these additional work requirements from the available time, you are left with the strategic reserve time (SRT) for each team member. (Notice the similarity of this process to the one used for Carolyn’s individual project in Chapter 2.)

The SRT is what you have available for other important long-range work that Patrick wants the department to do: produce technical management books and upgrade technology and systems to improve productivity.

Use Least-Resource Scheduling to Optimize Production

Knowing the SRT of each of your team members is the critical first step for optimizing the total productivity of your work team. Now, you have to figure the best way to fit additional work into the time and resources you have available.

That takes us back to our jigsaw-puzzle analogy. One strategy for putting together your jigsaw puzzle is to put together the edge pieces first, then fit the remaining pieces inside. The edge in this case involves the concept of least-resource scheduling.

One thing you notice about Patrick’s department is that it is lopsided. Look at the range of available time for members of this team:

Patrick: 50 hours

Kelly: 162 hours

Justin: 262 hours

Rod: 152 hours

DTP: 556 hours.

Least-resource scheduling. To understand the concept of least-resource scheduling, imagine that you run a construction company. Your independent project portfolio consists of the various buildings you have contracted to build. Your resources involve both people and equipment.

Imagine you only own one backhoe. You need the backhoe for two weeks on each project. No matter what, your theoretical best-case ability is limited to twenty-six buildings per year. No matter how many cranes, dump trucks, or people you employ, the single backhoe sets the speed limit for production.

That twenty-six building production limit is generous. The reality is that the backhoe will need maintenance, weather will interfere, and so on. The real production will be somewhat less. If you are going to get the most total production out of your resources, you have to make sure you do not waste any backhoe time.

You would naturally want to schedule the backhoe first, to make sure it is used optimally. Then you fit the other resources around the backhoe’s schedule—in the order of least to most available—to optimize production. Having a few dump trucks sitting around the yard unused on a given week is not necessarily wasteful if dump trucks are your most available resource.

When your resources are not exactly in balance, and they usually are not, you cannot help but have some excess. Make sure the excess is in the most available resource, not the least.

Determining the Least Resource

At first glance, Rod is the least resource on our team, because he has the fewest number of SRT hours available. That is usually not enough evidence to make a final decision.

One of the reasons for resource inequality on a project team is that people (and other resources) have different abilities and functions, and these are not always interchangeable. If all the team members have the same skills, assigning people in the order of fewest SRT hours to most SRT hours would be enough.

On our team, you have three people with editorial skills, one person with graphic design skills, and two people with desktop publishing skills, and they are not interchangeable. When planning least resources, you have to consider non-interchangeable skills. In fact, what you really have is:

Editorial: 474 hours

Graphics: 152 hours

DTP: 556 hours.

Even this analysis, which still leaves Rod as the least resource, is not enough to be certain. The projects you are trying to put into place are books, not magazines. In our situation, our books—dry, technical guides used as industry reference materials—tend to use a standard interior design. They require less graphic design time than the magazines. The DTP team performs most of the production work, except for the cover. The books are heavy in editorial requirements, too. Imagine that each book project requires eighty hours of editorial work, forty hours of desktop publishing, and only sixteen hours of graphic design work. You would need to look at availability in terms of number of projects, not number of hours. You would end up with:

Editorial: 6 projects

Graphics: 9.5 projects

DTP: 14 projects.

Notice that this would make Editorial, not Graphics, the least resource. Our theoretical, best-case book-publishing capacity is six projects for this quarter.

Think strategically. Always use project capacity, not just hours or number of resources, in determining which is your least resource.

Capacity Management for the Least Resource

You are not finished. If a book project requires eighty hours of editorial commitment, and Patrick only has fifty hours left for the entire quarter, you really should not count him as available for editorial work. That cuts editorial time to 424 hours, or 5.3 books, which you must round down to five (you cannot do a partial book), with twenty-four hours of editorial time uncommitted for the quarter.

Now look at Kelly and Justin, who will edit all our books. Kelly has 162 hours, which is two books with two hours left over, and Justin has 262 hours, which is three books, with twenty-two hours remaining. In Kelly’s case, scheduling her work for a three-month period with only a total safety margin of two hours is ludicrous. However, no one says that every book project must be started and finished within the same quarter. Schedule her for three books over six months, which would be 1.5 books in this quarter, with forty-two hours left over.

This is an ambitious schedule but not absurd. You have a reasonable margin in editorial work, and you will end up producing nine books in six months while keeping up with normal production.

Scheduling Excess Resources

Rod’s graphics schedule now has to allow for 4.5 projects at sixteen hours per project or seventy-two hours for the quarter, leaving eighty hours or two full weeks currently unallocated over a three-month period. Depending on surprises, problems, sick leave, and other emergencies, this may not be an excessive allowance; it is less than three days per month. You may want to add that into catch-up and emergency time and feel you have scheduled well enough. If you want to avoid the possibility of waste, identify some general projects that need to be done but do not have a specific deadline (organize the art files, check out other printers, and so on), and assign those to Rod. He can do as much of them as possible, and if emergencies crop up, nothing is lost.

The more serious problem is in DTP. You had 556 unscheduled hours. You subtract 4.5 projects at forty hours per project (180 hours), leaving 376 hours, which is nearly 9.5 weeks! You cannot allow that sort of waste in a well-run department. Fortunately, you can avoid it.

Sometimes you overlook support staff in a department. Because support staff members are sometimes younger or less educated, they are sometimes not thought of as professional. Nevertheless, support staff members are frequently looking for the opportunity to develop themselves and advance, or, even if advancement is not their ambition, they often want more interesting and varied work to do.

Here is an opportunity for some creative win/win thinking. Look at some ways you can use those 9.5 weeks effectively.

  Arrange training for them. The DTP people may be able to develop graphic design and editorial skills. This might qualify them for promotions or at least identify more challenging work, take the burden off other staff, and increase total productivity.

  Assign them to improve productivity. They probably know the hardware and software capabilities better than anyone else. Put them in charge of projects to use all the software tools and functions and to train the rest of the department in how to improve productivity.

  Trade with other departments. Your excess capacity may be just what another department needs, and it may have excess capacity that would help solve your problems. Talk to other managers to evaluate possibilities.

Think strategically. In planning work for a team, build from the scarcest resources to the most available, and use your surplus resources for long-term projects that improve productivity.

Fit the Final Schedule Together

Now, return to the jigsaw puzzle. You have the existing schedule; you need to allow for the various administrative, catch-up, and emergency project issues. You want to produce 4.5 books; and you want to assign some productivity-improvement projects to the DTP department (and one for Rod). All the earlier steps build the puzzle frame. Put together the rest of the puzzle, using trial and error.

This is a time-consuming process with some frustration attached. One shortcut is to ask team members to plan their own time around their time-fixed projects, enter the data, and resolve final conflicts. Another shortcut is the payoff from the learning curve, the more scheduling you do, the easier it gets.

EXERCISE

Jigsaw Puzzle Scheduling

Take a close look at the first month of our quarter. You are doing the entire February issue, starting the March issue late in the month, and starting the first-quarter journal issue. (Notice that the task, Receive reviewer comment, is a lag activity.)

Here is Kelly’s resource Gantt chart, showing her part of the month’s schedule.

And here is Kelly’s strategic reserve time chart for January.

1. Fit her additional responsibilities into her schedule.
2. Can she even begin work on a book project this month?

Answer Key

Answer to question 1: More than one answer may be possible. Here is one version of her complete schedule.

In producing this on the computer, each time you started and stopped a task (because something else was on her schedule), you had to start a new task line. Task 30, Administration time week of 1/5, is 0 hours, not 2, because she is already scheduled for 40 that week. As we pointed out earlier in this chapter, you are not really going to allow for this time; you simply expect Kelly to be efficient enough to make up two hours or work overtime. (She is probably an exempt employee, and you do not have to pay for her overtime anyway.)

Answer to question 2: No. Justin, on the other hand, could easily do one.