Excel template to manage multiple projects
Excel template to manage multiple projects
This article provides details of Excel template to manage multiple projects that you can download now.
Microsoft Excel software under a Windows environment is required to use this template
These Excel templates to manage multiple projects work on all versions of Excel since 2007.
Examples of a ready-to-use spreadsheet: Download this table in Excel (.xls) format, and complete it with your specific information.
To be able to use these models correctly, you must first activate the macros at startup.
The file to download presents five Excel template to manage multiple projects
- Analysistab multiple projects - Gantt template
Project Plan and Gant Chart Template helps you to plan a project timelines and resource. You can change the default data and formula to meet your needs.
Usage
We start plannign our projects after initial meetings and agreement. We plan our resource and timelines based on the requirements, deliverables and avaialble team and bandwidth. Project plan template helps to track all the tasks and its progress and status of each task. You can daily update the templates and share with your teams and customer/stakeholders to update the project status and progress. This is the must have tool for every project.
- Simple multiple project tracking template
"Getting Started:
In chronological order, use the boxes below to navigate through the tool as the project progresses. Click the blue buttons to go directly to the section of choice, or use the worksheet tabs along the bottom of the spreadsheet screen. Some of the column headings in the sections include comments that offer additional instructions. Hover the mouse over the column headings to view these instructions."
- Multiple project tracking template
The project workbook allows project managers, team members, sponsors, and stakeholders to easily track and monitor project activities. Any of these worksheets can easily be broken out into separate documents.
Daily organisations around the world make decisions altering strategic direction, developing new products, enhancing capacity or introducing new infrastructure/technology that will improve the efficiency and competitive position of the organisation. Such changes do not occur in a vacuum but instead management must attempt to balance between the ongoing requirements of the market place (namely operations) and the requirement for the organisation to better position itself for the future (namely develop). A common vehicle for planning and implementing organisational change is that of projects whose teams are resourced by personnel with operational commitments (Turner and Muller, 2003). As manufacturing engineers exist at the interface between these two pressures, they are under ever increasing stress to maximise efficiency within both the operations and projects in which they engage (O’Sullivan, 1994).
The modern manufacturing engineer is daily faced with multiple customer-focused projects, often exhibiting apparently conflicting demands. The challenge therefore is to manage these development projects in an effective and efficient manner, while at the same time continuing to run their operations successfully. The management of multiple projects is problematic (Turner and Speiser, 1992; Platje et al., 1994) and as such requires new tools to facilitate its effective management. While significant expertise has been developed within the area of project management, the need to manage ever more varied and disruptive projects, at different stages of their project life cycle poses new and challenging issues for organisations.
Organisations and its employees are faced with a new set of problems, which differ from those of managing individual projects (Turner and Speiser, 1992; Platje et al., 1994; Pellegrinelli, 1997). These challenges include issues such as the mix of projects (Elonen and Artto, 2003), balancing of resources across the portfolio (Engwall and Jerbrant, 2003), aligning the portfolio to achieve optimisation (Dooley, 2000) and reacting to “emergent shifts” during the life of the project (Cooper et al., 2000). Thus, in order for organisations to respond adequately to ever increasing demands, management require a new framework of tools to address the needs of multiple project management.
Project versus multiple project management
Projects and their management
Leintz and Rea (1995) stress that the current trends towards global competition, rapid technological change and reengineering are increasing the importance of project management processes since the project manager and their team are “agents of change”. Projects are suited for undertaking organisational change as they are “a temporary undertaking, with a specific objective that must be accomplished by organized application of appropriate resources” (Rosenau 1998). Tidd et al. (2001) support the importance of organisational project management competencies and view them as highly correlated with an organisation’s ability to innovate their systems successfully. Duncan (1996) defines project management as “the application of knowledge skills, tools and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from the project”. It is a cyclical process of planning, monitoring and review, where strong inference is placed on communication during the planning stage (Reiss, 1992). Duncan (1996) further expands on the project management process, viewing it as encompassing the stages of project initiation, planning, execution, control and the closing process.
Differing authors have concentrated on critiquing factors to be defined and controlled as part of the project management process. Meredith and Mantell (1995) discuss these factors under the broad headings of budgeting and cost estimation, scheduling and resource allocation. Rosenau (1998) states that project objectives must focus on accomplishing the “triple constraints” of performance specification, time schedules and cost budget simultaneously. He views the project lifecycle as consisting of a number of key activities, namely the definition of project objectives, formulation of the project plan, leading and monitoring plans for implementation and finally project completion. As part of their analysis of project management, Leintz and Rea (1995) identify a number of characteristics that affect project success. These are:
. The clarity of project objectives.
. The fit between a project’s scope and the objectives it tries to achieve.
. The strong relationship of all projects with the standard structure of the company.
. The identification and proper management of potential difficulties early in a project.
. Maintaining a small, effective project implementation team that possesses the necessary skills to achieve the project objectives.
As a portfolio of projects is a collection of individual projects, the above issues remain highly relevant when managing multiple projects.
Managing multiple projects
While the management of individual projects is difficult, the situation becomes much more complicated where there are multiple projects ongoing within an organisation. Projects need to be viewed as an integrated portfolio rather than a disjointed collection. In managing multiple projects, one is required to maintain control over a varied range of specialist projects, balance often conflicting requirements with limited resources and co-ordinate the project portfolio to ensure the optimum organisational outcome is achieved. The issue of managing multiple projects, brings with it a new set of problems that the organisation must address. These issues have been addressed by researchers under various guises, including: programme management (Pellegrinelli, 1997); multi-project management (Van Der Merwe, 1997); portfolio planning (Turner and Speiser, 1992; Platje et al., 1994); and global, one of a kind projects (Hameri, 1997). While there are subtle differences between the perspectives of the researchers, the core problems faced by organisations are the same. The cause of some of the difficulties related to managing multiple projects is highlighted by Turner and Speiser (1992), who emphasise that:
. Projects have interfaces with other projects and day-to-day operations, sharing common deliverables, resources, information or technology across those interfaces.
. Projects must negotiate priority for resources on an almost daily basis with other projects and day-to-day operations.
. Projects deliver related objectives, which contribute to the overall development objectives of the parent organisation.