While working with various organizations to implement good project management practices, we come to a point when the question inevitably arises: How many projects can one project manager manage? If you want to answer them honestly, you need to use the magic formula “it depends”. However, it is important to indicate what it depends on. Below I will try to summarize the basic guidelines. However, let’s start by defining general rules that more or less correspond to reality, regardless of the organization.
Out of an 8-hour working day, we actually spend 6 hours on work related to our scope of responsibilities – the remaining 2 hours are taken up by various general activities in our organization, which are also necessary, but it is difficult to assign them to a specific scope of tasks or project initiative. Of course, it can already be said here that it looks different, e.g. at different levels of the organization: the lower, the less general activities (the specialist performs primarily specialized tasks), the higher, the more general activities (management is involved in many activities relating to the company in general from details to strategic principles).
It is assumed that project management requires from 10% to 20% of work time dedicated in total to managing the project, which depends on the type of project or industry – some authors therefore propose averaging up to 15% of time and, therefore, for a project involving 1,000 man-hours of production work, assuming 150 man-hours for project management.
However, we must take into account that the work time dedicated to project management is not distributed evenly during the project – in general, activities related to initiating and planning projects consume a lot of time, and they are usually concentrated at the beginning of the project or project phase, and in the case of the agile at the beginning of the sprint.
Additionally, it must be remembered that the above arrangements apply “only” to project management. Very often, in addition to acting as a project manager, a person must also perform “productive” work. The contribution of this work will also vary significantly depending on the type of project and the individual’s competency profile. PMBOK® Guide compares a project manager to an orchestra conductor, but sometimes, apart from this role, you also have to be a true multi-instrumentalist in the project.
There is a danger of too much involvement in the role of a “supplier” in the project, which may result in too narrow a view of the project and ineffective fulfillment of the role of the project manager responsible for achieving the project goals as effectively as possible.
When trying to answer the question about the possible workload of a given person in the project, I suggest taking into account:
- Project size – measured by the forecast number of man-hours or budget size;
- The level of complexity of the project – measured by the number of project areas or products;
- Project phase – in accordance with the adopted project life cycle;
- The role of the person in the project – the role of the project manager, the role of the advisor, the role of the contractor;
- Other responsibilities of the person – roles related to conducting business as usual.
In practice, I would initially accept the possibility of participating in a maximum of 5 project initiatives at the same time. However, nothing can replace learning from experience in a given work environment. Therefore, I suggest observing for a quarter how this level of commitment works for individual people in individual projects. Based on the experience gained, this factor should then be adjusted for specific project types. I recommend repeating such a retrospective every quarter.
