Course Schedule

Best Practices for Managing Multiple Projects

Discover how to balance resources across multiple projects and minimize risks while improving performance. You will examine two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) winners—and learn the best practices they share and how to put them into action in your organization.

Find out the common characteristics of successful multi-project environments—such as ensuring communication from top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top…encouraging change…and establishing accountability.

  • Characteristics of successful environments and how to promote them
  • How to integrate project management with other business processes
  • Migration concepts of project management
  • Leveraging tools which support multi-project management
  • How to establish roles and responsibilities of project-oriented groups
  • About emerging techniques and how to apply them
  • How the best companies apply metrics to a business environment
  • How to implement organizational structures that support multi-project management

Primary Concepts for Managing Multi-Projects

  • Objectives of multi-project management
  • Best practices for MPM success

Establishing an Environment for Success

  • Best practices within the industry and within the class
  • Organizational structures that support MPM

How the Program Management Office Relates to Managing Multi-Projects

  • Managing inter-project coordination points
  • Multi-project resource leveling
  • Developing project managers
  • Program/portfolio reporting
  • Constructing a PMO

The Project Management Business Process

  • Business process basics
  • Core concepts of improvement
  • The project management business process: gate and process reviews

Management by Metrics

  • Characteristics of successful metrics
  • Collecting and reporting on the data
  • Establishing a baseline and target goals
  • Multi-project applications of earned value
  • Applying balanced scorecard to MPM
  • Queuing theory and basics
  • The great project conundrum
  • Resource utilization in a multi-project environment
  • The theory of constraints
  • Multi-project (program) critical path

Summary:

  • Achieving Best Practices in Multi-Project Management
  • Consistency in project management practices
  • Cultural characteristics needed for MPM
  • Organizational responsibility

Project and program directors and managers, department heads, senior managers and anyone who is trying to balance resources across multiple projects