The way to get something done is — quoting the well-known Nike footwear ad — to “just do it.” Focus on the task and get it done. For those who work in organizations that rely on programs of projects — multi-project environments where resources are shared across a number of projects — there are usually a lot of things that need to get done. An environment of many projects typically generates many priorities for project resources and managers alike and can make that focus difficult to achieve.
Division of attention multiplies task and project lead-time…
In an effort to take advantage of valuable new opportunities, multi-project organizations, more often than not, tend to launch projects as soon as they are understood, concurrently with existing projects, simultaneously with other new efforts, and unfortunately too often, without sufficient regard to the capacity of the organization. A common result is that the responsibility for sorting out an array of conflicting priorities often falls to project resources and their managers. One concern coming from this situation is that the resultant locally set priorities may not be in synch with each other or, more importantly, with the global priorities of the larger organization. A common result of trying to deal with this tug-of-war of multiple priorities is the practice of multitasking — assigning resources to more than one significant task during a particular window of time — to try to move all the projects along.
In addition, many project teams rely on early starts of projects and their paths of tasks to try to assure and achieve timely project completion. These early starts — also driven partially by the desire to see “progress” on all open projects — often translate to additional pressure on resources to multitask between tasks and between projects. There is pressure to get started on a new task in the in-box, but we’re still working on another task. As a result, these practices of early starts and multitasking have been recognized as common practice in many organizations, and even institutionalized in project management software tools, which typically default to “ASAP” scheduling, and which offer “features” to apply “fractional resources” to tasks and to “split” tasks.
Read more at: Focused Performance