Congestion

Many organizations suffer from project congestion: far too many projects in progress at the same time.

The reason is not surprising in our impatient world, with ongoing changes from customers, owners, authorities, and many urgent problems to solve; there are many ideas for projects with promising cost versus benefit. It is simply hard to say no or refuse good projects.

The result is not surprising. Because of too little capacity (especially from key resources and too little capacity for planning and control) projects are getting delayed repeatedly and lead time grows to unacceptable levels.

What to do?

1. First, clean up: go through all your projects, each project's status, future requirements, cost/benefit and all the risk factors. For each project, decide whether it is still worth doing or if it should be cancelled.
   
2. For all remaining projects make the ideal plan in terms of lead time considering dependencies and minimum calendar time needed for each task.
   
3. Assign budget resources to all tasks ahead with the right skills and the estimated need of hours daily or weekly.
   
4. Compare the needed capacity with the available capacity from in house people as well as externals per. required skill.
   
5. Analyze carefully and decide again if there are projects which should be discarded.
   

   
    

For the future you should consider implementing systematic Project Portfolio Management to help debate project proposals and arrive at a common objective, understanding that there are limits to respect and priorities must be made.