Managing the Shared Worker

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

A PM at one of my customers recently asked me how I managed my time when I was working with multiple clients at the same time. How could I juggle multiple priorities and deadlines and reconcile what could be conflicting needs? In explaining how I went about doing it, I used the analogy of a resource who was assigned to his project for a percentage of their time and to another project for the remainder of their time. I explained how that put additional responsibilities on both the resource themselves (me in my analogy) and on the PMs (or my customers).

His response was that he was still rather confused because he never found that he could be successful managing people in that situation--things always seemed to go wrong. That seemed like a perfect invitation to write an article on that subject...

Clear expectations
It’s not uncommon to have an individual assigned to multiple projects at the same time. Organizations need to maximize the utilization rates of their employees, and frequently we have to deal with people who are the “single point of expertise” on a project--the only person capable of handling more specialized tasks and therefore in high demand on multiple projects for those specific tasks.

To make this model work, there needs to be clear transparency and expectations between all of the people involved. To keep the examples easy, if a …

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