Why is Managing Multi Projects Important?

In today’s global and competitive environment, time to market is one of the most crucial factors in projects.

Projects become more and more complicated and dynamic. Project related activities have to be executed concurrently by different units in the organization or even externally to meet time constraints. As a result, the project environment becomes complex and hard to manage.

Modularization of projects and placing dependencies across different projects, is one way of simplifying the management of this complex project environment.

Following are some characteristics of a complex project where we would recommend dividing the project  into several sub-projects:

• Project runs in parallel in multiple divisions or even external contractor organizations. Each division is responsible for the different parts of the project.
• Parts of the complex project use different resources and budget
• Specific sets of project related activities run concurrently and are handled mostly independently from each other.
• Parts of the complex project require different types of activities
• Master – Detail plans. Separate master projects in case there is a need  to:
• handle and review specific project activities by stakeholders that are less involved in the task performance activities, but are rather reviewers of the project or
• to give an overall view of the activities that run in several sub-projects

Multiple projects can run entirely in parallel, but you may need to create specific points of dependencies between them. It is extremely important to have a tool that allows you to:

• Create  and locate dependencies between multiple projects
• Track projects with such points of dependencies

Clarizen allows managing multiple projects that are:

• Tightly dependant on each other, having numerous points of dependency and in many cases having project – sub-project relations
• Loosely dependant, running mostly in parallel and having few points of dependencies