Are You an Overloaded Project Manager?

Project managers usually manage more than one project at a time, which means they provide more value to their organization. But problems can arise when a project manager has too much work to do.  The Project Management Institute’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct recommends that project managers be honest and work within their skills and capabilities. So, if your workload is excessive, you should ask for help. Here are some indications that you are or could soon be overloaded.

• Your PM workload adds up to more than your expected work hours in any given timeframe. A rough estimate of your PM workload is to calculate the total hours for all project work tasks (non-project-management) and then add 15% for project management. For instance, if the total hours for work tasks is 100 hours, 15 project management hours is a reasonable estimate. When you manage multiple projects, add up the 15% PM estimates from each project. If the combined total for any timeframe exceeds your expected work hours, there is a risk of overload.
  

  Project manager workload with possible overload

• Stakeholders feel ignored. Stakeholder management is an important activity for project managers. An early indicator of PM overload is key stakeholders saying they don’t know what’s happening on a project or say they are frustrated by their questions not being addressed. If this happens, look at the type of issues stakeholders raise and the complexity of your projects. Overly complex projects, even small ones, could require more time than the 15% rule of thumb suggests, which could cause PM overload.
• Schedules aren’t updated. As a project manager, maintaining the project schedule is a fundamental, administrative project management task. As tasks are completed, you record progress and re-estimate project cost and completion time. If you’re overloaded, schedule updates are one of the first things that drops off your radar, even if you have a scheduling person to help you. If you don’t have time to update the schedule, it is time to ask to have some of your projects to be reassigned or to get some additional help.
• Team synergy problems arise. Project managers need to ensure their team members are on board and working well together. They must understand their role, the responsibilities of other team members, and the relationships between deliverables. If this understanding breaks down, a PM typically notices these problems quickly. If not, you haven’t been paying attention to your team’s status, which could be due to your being overloaded.
• Technical project issues arise and aren’t addressed. If you haven’t addressed technical issues that arose, this could be an indication of project manager overload. However, it can also mean you don’t have enough training or that you don’t have access to an experienced technical team member to address those issues. If that’s the case, you should ask for a technical resource to help you (because by that time training will take too long). 

Note: If you are supervising project managers, you can use these overload indicators to identify project managers that need help or to reassign projects to others.

What do you look for to determine whether you or one of your project managers is overloaded? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about project management effort, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Keep on the lookout for more Office Hours broadcasts in July!

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 39,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________