From the course: Project Management Simplified

Resource planning for multiple projects

From the course: Project Management Simplified

Resource planning for multiple projects

- What about if you have more than one project happening at the same time? How do you know that your perfectly planned project isn't going to be affected by one of the other projects that's going on somewhere else? And that's quite a common occurrence because for many organizations, people are their limiting factor. The number of projects that they can do is not limited by money, but by the number of people they can get for all the things that they want to do. So planning the required resources for all of your projects is a key ingredient of your strategic planning, 'cause otherwise all you have a wish list of goals, which you may not be able to achieve. So if you have multiple projects, here's how you do it. You can see that this Gantt of Gantts, as I call it, shows both the past and the future. For the past, it shows you instantly that Project A is finished, Project B is behind schedule. We should have nearly finished it, we should have done about 90%, but we're not keeping up with the Today line and we've actually only done about 70% of it, so we're behind. Then on Project C we're ahead and on D, we should have started, but we haven't, so we're already behind. And then it also shows you the future, can we do E, F, and G all at the same time and if we can't, then which ones will we have to leave until next year? With the arrival of each new project you can check that it's doable and if not, you can argue for more resources, or the new project will have to wait, or you can have a discussion about which one of the others will have to be postponed. In my experience, very few organizations have a Gantt of Gantts, which is a real shame because they're so useful for monitoring the past and planning the future. So the question is, do you need to make a Gantt of Gantts for your area? Are you limited for the amount of projects that you can get done? Are you wanting to do more projects than you probably can? And if so, are you going to think about making a Gantt of Gantts?

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