So you’ve got a whole load of projects that want to do, or are planning to do, over the coming months, with various required finish dates etc. But can you do it all?
The first step is to draw out all of your projects, to see roughly in total what you’re up against:
Now the question is “Can we DO all these projects?”.
It would be difficult enough to calculate if we had just one name against each task – we could add them up for each person – but we have groups on each task: so what do we do?
My suggestion is to take one week, one of the busier ones probably, and analyse that. Keep a list of all the projects on the left, and then across the top put the names. Then ask each person (or group) to say how many hours of that week they will need in order to do that task that week.
Once you have that information you can add it up and see if anyone is overloaded
You can see that the week I chose is shown in pink and is “smeared out” across the names of the people working on tasks that week – and then I have added up the totals at the bottom, to discover that only Louise has any chance of doing her required work in that week. The rest will need some help if we are to achieve the required progress on those projects that we want to do.
And if they ARE overworked in that week then you know that either that project will have to be postponed, or, much better, those extra hours will have to be delegated or moved sideways onto someone else. so we need to know who that will be, and ask them to commit to putting that time in their calendar so they can definitely deliver what the project requires.
At last we have a good plan!
