Most of us work in a multi-project environment. We all have experiences of having to stop working on one task so that progress can be accomplished on another task in another project. Often, we wonder if all this jumping around makes sense because it comes with the penalties of reduced focus and loss of efficiency. However, there is a reason for this multi-tasking environment.
Senior managers and project managers are responsible to a “customer” for successful completion of a project. These customers can be internal or external to an organisation. Customers have a tendency to be demanding. They think that their project is the highest priority and they want to see frequent/continuous progress on their project. Resources tend to migrate between projects in response to the latest, loudest customer demand or senior management or board pressure in an attempt to keep as many customers satisfied as possible.
This focus on showing progress on as many active projects as possible is the major cause of multi-tasking. As we will see, this focus is to the detriment of the overall project through-put of the organisation.