The single biggest risk to delivering multiple projects with shared resources is multitasking. Multitasking, at the individual or team level, can lead all of the projects to be delivered as late as possible (or even exponentially later).

A project is the sum of the value adding interactions and products of the individuals. Anything that delays the work or handoffs will have an even greater delay on the total project.

The obvious answer to this challenge is dedicate teams, but we'd like a better one.

While some sophisticated planning systems deal with exactly these issues to predict resource loading and timetables (like Tony Rizzo's work at PDInstitute) I find that the simplest approach is to use a strong prioritization strategy.

Here are the rules for a multi-project priority-based system:

1. Each project (externally valuable and deliverable) is prioritized in rank order. (Only a single highest priority, and single second priority allowed!)
2. Each individual task or handoff assumes the priority of its owning project.
3. Any individual works until completion or hard block on a single task.
4. Any individual chooses the highest priority task when several available.

These rules leave open a few holes, like what to do when you've just started a task and a higher one comes in.

I'd say you're trying to achieve two opposite goals:

• Organizing things in a way which gives 3-month visibility ahead

• Having complete freedom when it comes to priority changing and ad-hoc tasks

From what I read (and recall since I used to work in similar environment) I expect unplanned top priority tasks just have to be done. This basically means your 3-month plan won't be precise or even it will be completely changed if you're out of luck. I'd add that you'll waste pretty much time constantly reworking your project plans every time something important kicks in.

What I'd look for to improve visibility is trying to organize a team in a way that reflect a bit better environment you work in. A few of ideas:

1. Try to isolate projects from each other as much as possible especially in terms of context switching, e.g. people generally don't work on a more than one project as long as it isn't absolutely necessary. It means you may need to reject designating the most suitable/the best people to the project because they're busy with some other task. This would allow you to control every single project a bit better and improve 3-month visibility but every new high-priority task will be a risk for current tasks. Since you can't control new things you can't plan them precisely either.

2. Measure unplanned tasks. Especially all these estimations etc which aren't related to any project being under development. With enough historical data you should be able to say a bit more how much of interruption time you statistically have and that you should cut out from your team work time. This would give you well-grounded buffer for such tasks thus you should be able to measure standard project work with more precision.

3. If there are a lot of interruptions (e.g. estimates, bug fixing and change requests in old systems) you may consider changing team organization. E.g. Kanban supports frequent priority changes very well. However there are a couple of caveats. Kanban won't help you to draw 3-month work plan but would rather focus on pushing top-priority things as fast as possible. You would also need a very smooth priority management - e.g. one person being able to judge what is the most important thing to do at the moment. This would be also a big change for the whole team. This one isn't a sure-shot, easy-to-implement kind of advice but I wish I knew Kanban myself when I was working in environment like this. If you need more information on Kanban just let me know.

Either way I don't think you'd be able to come up with reliable 3-month plan in such environment. The best you can do is to make it a bit better and a bit more predictable.

With Ms Project you can create a pool of resources and each project use this pool, you have to assign different priorities to each project to redistribute the resources. I am configured a solution with Ms Project that it could be useful four you, gedproDS, but now it is only available in spanish, you can look how it works at http://www.gedpro.com/Soluciones/gedproDS/VideosgedproDS.aspx

Since you have MS Project I would stick with it. Now if you have the opportunity to upgrade to MS Project Server it would benefit you. With Server you can track multiple projects and use resources from a single pool that will help you share such resources. Since project server comes with a dumb down version of SharePoint it allows for collaboration also. Project by itself can be a bit of a challenge to manage several projects unless you make all the "smaller" projects sub-projects of a master.

Key to managing multiple projects is linkages. Predecessors and Successors must be linked correctly to get a good feel for what is going on. I would look at alos sharing some of the load when it comes to the management of these sub-projects. Find other team members and have them track a portion of the other projects and report results.

Remember that with at an Internal Baseline Review (IBR) executing any project becomes almost and impossibility.

Rob

System-wise you want to look at the way lean/kanban/scrum handle their backlog of work. One master requirements list (which can be at the feature release if you want.)

The simple secret tot heir model is one Master List of things you need to do. All your "to do" stuff goes on the list. The top of the list is the next thing you focus on. The bottom of the list is not so important.

How do you work out how much you can get done in 3 months? Try using the systems described by Mike Cohn in his Agile Planning and Estimating book. Velocity (how much you can get done) is derived by observing past performance. All you need is a stable estimate/measure of the work packages. It's all in his book and on his website.

This is simple and easy to implement.

Tool-wise Take a look at Pivotal tracker as a task list/backlog manager..

Hey, Albert. I have no idea if this'll help or not but I made a little tool here: http://bit.ly/611hxX. It's the "Capacity Planning with Multiple Projects" one. It may or may not be useful to you. I was in a similar situation where my portfolio management system was too clunky and I just wanted something that would give me an answer in like 5 minutes what the impacts would be if I made a resource change, or if one of my projects went overtime with the same pool of resources.

I didn't want to have to call IT, and didn't want to have to have to enter all kinds of parameters into a system I might bugger up. So I made that and it met most of my high level (what if I do this) needs. All I did since was slap pretty colours on it.

It assumes a lot of things which may not work for you, but if the underlying theory is the same you may find some value.

Sounds like you need the right tool. There are several posts on project management tools on this site. Do a search on the tag "tool".

Here is a link to one of those posts, specifically on web-based project management software.

Albert,

You should seriously consider a time-based (by week, by month) capacity vs demand matrix that will be based off your assignments. If you know where resources are going to be assigned then it should not be too complex assuming you use the right tools.

Best regards, JD.