Multiprojecting: Progress by Illusion

Computerworld - Your CIO has two projects he wants finished in the next month. "We can share this project manager and that test team on both of these high-priority projects," he declares confidently. "The projects are small enough that the teams should be able to make progress." Two weeks later, the CIO realizes neither project is progressing the way he'd envisioned. What's going on?

Quantity does not equal quality

"Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality." -- George Santayana

The short answer is that putting the same people on two high-priority projects only creates the illusion of progress by focusing on quantity of projects being worked on, not projects completed. Here's what really happened.

The project manager worked mornings on Project 1 and afternoons on Project 2. Part of the test group also chose to work mornings and afternoons. But the other part of the test group used Monday and Tuesday for Project 1 and the rest of the week for Project 2 because of the way they needed to work with the developers. The first problem was that the project team, including the project manager and the testers, didn't work on the same project at the same time.

The project manager and the testers maintained their time organization only for the first week. After the first week, the project manager was an obstacle to both projects, because he was working on one project when he was needed on the other. Work from Project 1 piled up when he was on Project 2 and vice versa. By the start of the third week, the project manager hadn't cleared any obstacles for either of the project teams.

The testers couldn't help the projects make progress either. One tester who split his project work into mornings and afternoons discovered a problem that required test data from one of the Monday/Tuesday testers. It was bad enough that the testers had to wait on one another for information, but the developers had to wait for the testers, too. The developers would start to fix problems, then have to wait more than a week for the testers to verify them.

In this case, the multiprojecting caused people to be far less productive than if they'd been assigned to only one project at a time.

The Case of Disappearing Time

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams

People pay a context-switching cost when they switch from one project to another. Even if they try to assign half of