I am in the process of researching the effectiveness of Project Managers in relation to the number of projects they are managing at a given time. The assumption, that I am sure everyone will agree on, is as the number of projects increase the effectiveness will decrease. I am interested in what the breaking point is; the number of projects that jeopardizes the success of all projects. You could relate this to program management, but in some scenarios the projects that are being managed by one Project Managers are not focused on the same business objective.
If anyone has any information on this relationship, I would be happy to hear from you.
Taking the discussion back to the original question, the max number of projects one can manage... 4-5 seems to the general opinion. It should be interesting to bring up the "Chunking Theory" here, which says the optimum number of chunks (any meaningful units of information) that short term memory can handle is 7 +/- 2. ie. 5 to 9. Again, from my experience, it is possible to go upto 7 or 9 projects. For that, delegation is the key since the extent of activities a person can perform on a given day or week is finite. The next importatnt thing the tools one uses. A project management tool with true multi project capability and delegation support, designed to tackle the many intricacies related to multiple project scenarios, simplifies matters a lot.
