The podcast by project managers for project managers. Hear practical advice from Elizabeth Harrin on how to more effectively manage a significant project workload, and how to manage several projects at once. This episode is about saving time and working smarter!

Table of Contents

02:07 … Meet Elizabeth03:44 … Inspiration for the Book06:56 … A Multi-Project Environment07:41 … Scheduling Challenges08:44 … Simplifying Scheduling10:55 … Managing Dependencies12:10 … Engaging Stakeholders13:46 … Sushi, Spaghetti, and Side Dish Workloads15:13 … 5 Major Concepts15:52 … Portfolio 18:39 … Planning19:32 … Kevin and Kyle21:03 … People Management23:39 … Time Limitations with Senior Execs25:45 … Better Connections27:01 … Productivity28:07 … Overcoming Procrastination28:57 … RAID31:31 … Positioning33:44 … The Five Email Rule34:44 … The Future of Project Management36:16 … Contact Elizabeth37:04 … Closing

ELIZABETH HARRIN: ...And if we have organizations that support us, and the culture is there to understand the capacity for change, then we can fly.  We can do the things that our companies, our organizations need us to do because we do have the right skills to do it.  The challenge, the flipside of that is often we’re asked to do that without the resources, funding, and time to make it possible.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website, Velociteach.com; on social media; whichever podcast-listening app you use.  If you have questions about our podcasts or about project management certifications, we’re always here for you.

Today we’re talking to someone we’ve spoken to before, and she’s well known in the circles of project management.  This is Elizabeth Harrin.  She’s an author, speaker, and a mentor who helps people manage projects.  She has lots of straight-talking, real-world advice.  Elizabeth is an APM fellow and the author of seven books, and she’s on a mission to make sure you can deliver better quality projects with more confidence and less stress.

BILL YATES:  In this episode we’re going to talk about Elizabeth’s latest book.  It’s called “Managing Multiple Projects.”  In that book she offers advice on ways you can more effectively manage your project workload.  If you’re like me, you typically had more than one project that you were managing at a time.  Elizabeth tackles that.  She gives great advice.  Every chapter ends with key takeaways and action steps.  Another thing I really appreciate about her writing style is she invites a lot of practitioners, project managers to give advice, share tips, share struggles.  You’ll see those interwoven throughout each chapter.  Great book, great resource.  I’m excited to talk with Elizabeth about it today.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Elizabeth, it’s so good to have you back, virtually.  And welcome to Manage This.

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me back.  It’s great to be here talking to you today.

Meet Elizabeth

WENDY GROUNDS:  So I’ve read your book, and it is excellent, very helpful resource.  And I was also looking back at when we last talked to you, and it was sometime I think in 2018.  And I wasn’t even on the podcast yet.  I think it was right before I joined Manage This.  So it’s been a while.  What have you been up to in the last four years?

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  That was quite a long time ago; wasn’t it.  So what I’ve been doing since then, well, I was leading projects until the autumn of 2019, so just before we went into the pandemic.  In the worst of the pandemic I stopped working in a corporate project management role, and I took a couple of years away from that to spend some time writing, including that book; teaching, mentoring, that kind of thing, doing some freelance work.  And I went back to corporate project management earlier this year, actually, yeah, earlier 2022, and to get back into what life is like as a project manager in a more virtual world. 

BILL YATES:  It is different, certainly.

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  It is different.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  I love the fact that, as an author of books, you still have your hands in it.  And I appreciate that. Not only are you asking the opinions of project managers and surveying them and that influences your work, but also your own experience.  And I think that resonates throughout this book.  I’m excited about getting into it, and this is a great contribution to project managers.  So, well done.

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  Thank you very much.  I’m really proud of it.  I know that I’m not that good at blowing my own trumpet, and I know we shouldn’t really be boastful about things that we’ve done.  But I love this book.  It feels like something I can be really proud of.  So I’m glad that you’ve responded that way because it would be awful if I’d written something I thought was really great, and everyone was like, meh.

Inspiration for the Book

BILL YATES:  Wah-wah.  Yeah.  I think right off the bat the statistic that just resonated with me personally and just from my own experience talking with our students and our customers, is that the reality is project managers are managing multiple projects, you know, to the point of the title of your book.  And as your research was showing, 85% of the project managers lead two or more projects.  That was my experience, always had at least two customers, usually three, maybe a few more at times.  But it just changes things.  And some of the advice you give in the book lines up with that so beautifully.  So before we get into that, what really led you to write the book?  Was it your own experience in managing projects?  Or was it also kind of the outflow of information that you were getting from other project managers?

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  I think it was a bit of both.  It was coming back to work after maternity leave and realizing that I’d gone from one big-ish project which felt very together to a part-time job.  And as the part-time person I got a lot of small things to do.  So there was a change in my workload which led me to have to work in different ways.  And I started to listen to what other people were saying, as well, and this whole gap around the education around how do you juggle everything?  What do you when the project management process says do these 10 steps?  Do I have to do these 10 steps every time for every project?  Can’t I be a bit smarter about things?  And that seemed to come up quite a lot with people’s workloads.  And we were all struggling.

So I got a group of people together, and we did a six-month deep dive, really, into sharing what I had learned about managing multiple projects.  And as a training exercise it seemed to be quite successful.  People seemed to get something out of it.  And I suppose my interest in the topic started from that, thinking through, wow, this is something that’s really missing in the way that we’re taught about how to manage projects because all the courses I had done, even the ones I teach, up until that point had just literally been around this fake fantasy world of all the stakeholders love the project, they all support you, everything happens according to plan, and you’ve only got one thing to do.

And of course the stakeholders are all on 10 different projects.  Resources are all on 10 different projects.  We’re working for the person that shouts the loudest.  And that’s not real life.  It’s not surprising that project managers feel stressed in their jobs, when everything that we give them to do their jobs doesn’t really match reality.  I mean, that might be a bit facetious, and I’m sure that there are plenty of roles where it’s a bit more structured and organized.  But I think that’s real life for most people.

So, as with any book, and as with any training course, you take it away, and you learn what you can, but you have to tailor it to fit your environment. If you’ve got more things in your toolbox, you can then say, well, this strategy will work for me.  This one won’t.  But if I changed it a bit, then it might work on that project.  And you can kind of build your own set of working principles.  And I think what I was trying to do was just start that conversation for people.  How can I lift myself out of the weeds?  How can I be smarter about how I work?  And maybe some of the ideas in this book will fast-track that for me so that I can get there better.

A Multi-Project Environment

WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s start right at the beginning.  Can you describe for us what a multi-project environment looks like, and the skills that someone would need to sharpen if they were taking on a multi-project workload?

ELIZABETH HARRIN:  I think what it looks like is someone who’s trying to do several projects at the same time, maybe for different clients, maybe for the same client, whether that’s an internal customer or an external customer.  And they’re all at potentially different points in the project lifecycle, and they might be different sizes.  So there’s quite a lot of skills that come into play.  So I’d say, if I had to give the listeners three things to work on or to be aware of if they were about to start picking up more than one project at a time, moving into a role where that was a requirement, I would say scheduling, managing dependencies, and stakeholder engagement.

Scheduling Challenges

For scheduling, you can have lots of detailed Gantt charts for all your different projects.  But I’ve personally found that to be quite time-consuming to pull together.  So I am an advocate of scheduling my milestones where you can get away with it, or at least having a view of what are my main milestones on my projects?