Project Management

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Managing Many Multiple Short Projects

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Anonymous
Our environment requires that project managers juggle several hundred small customer implementations at one time. Often these implementations can be done in just a day or two. It is more like a factory, than a project. Each customer wants to know when we will get them set-up. At one end of the spectrum, we have tried classic project management techniques doing tasks, tasks estimates, reosurce assignments and capturing actuals. That allows complete management and predictability, but adds a lot of overhead. On the other end of the spectrum, we have just kept a basic "to-do" list. It is low overhead, but allows no ability to forecast workloads, resources, timeframes, etc.

Has anyone working with multiple, small, fast projects found something that works for them?
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Frank Patrick Boonton, Nj, United States
This definitely sounds like production rather than projects. Before I comment further, how much variability is in the process. Do these mini-projects suffer from a great deal of unpredictable sources of Murphy's Law or once promised, are they relatively straightforward activities with minimal resource-to-resource handoffs (as I suspect due to the 1 and 2-day turnarounds) with known and limited variation associated with the performance of the work?

If the latter, you're trying to kill an fly with an elephant gun if you are trying to overlay comprehensive project management on the process.

One other question. Is there an identifiable critical constraining resource in the process? Is there some resource that is heavily and commonly used across these projects? (I guess that's two questions, but really asking the same thing.)

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Anonymous
I should have explained that my 1-2 days was actual work effort. Elapsed time might be 1-2 weeks. Each implementation is custom work, but the variations are not large. The struggle is that the customer has to tell us about their specs, and then when we are done, they have to test the process, and they are not always motivated to respond quickly. There are also multiple hand-offs internally. So the customer is actually the constraint. Our project managers actually focus most of their time on that constraint, rather than managing the internal work.

I still have a business to run, so I do need to know what it is costing me in terms of salary/hours. So far, keeping a checklist, and logging time in large buckets seems to be the best fit. I agree that classic large project management techniques are the elephant gun. But when handed 5,000 of these set-ups to do, the elapsed time of the project is months... so it leaves me uncomfortable not managing it as a large project
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Michael Wood Project Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent Contractor Gig Harbor, Wa, United States
I would tend to use an assembly line model than a PM model
I would treat each install as a unit of production. It sounds like you have a pipelilne that has very predictable and repeatable steps with a few feature add-ons.
I would imagine you have a resource allocation issue and want to know where each unit of production is on the assembly line. You might want to explore the trade-offs between highly specialized people doing the same tasks over and over versus a team that takes each unit through the productioin process.
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Michael Wood Project Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent Contractor Gig Harbor, Wa, United States
I would tend to use an assembly line model than a PM model
I would treat each install as a unit of production. It sounds like you have a pipelilne that has very predictable and repeatable steps with a few feature add-ons.
I would imagine you have a resource allocation issue and want to know where each unit of production is on the assembly line. You might want to explore the trade-offs between highly specialized people doing the same tasks over and over versus a team that takes each unit through the productioin process.
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Xavier Ribera International Project Manager & Head of Project Managers Group| Edicom Paterna, Valencia, Spain
The major part of our projects fall down the picture you show. We have designed a methodology called ETM (Efficient Team Management) which is fed from PMBOK and SCRUM techniques. The projects are assigned to a Team, the team has a leader and 2 or 3 Project Managers. Our planning minimum time unit is the "hour" and you can have a mix of large planned classic project and short scheduling for short projects (sometimes we call that "tasks"). We use concepts like "kanban","back-log", "fix date execution" etc. The above allow us to be very flexible and make us able to manage a wide range of project types.

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