How to organize huge amount of tasks in a mult-project environment?

Question

I work in a consulting/agency and am currently the only developer and deep-technical person there. Therefore I am currently assignt to 6-7 projects in which I have different roles from developer to architect or technical project manager. Most of the tasks, even if they are of conceptual nature, are broken down to tickets, but they are in different jiras and asanas.

I have the feeling that a large part of my time is spent organizing and prioritizing my work. In particular, I'm trying to set up a system with our PMs so that we have all the tasks from the different jiras in one bundled system. Unfortunately, this results in a huge mountain of tasks that hardly motivate me to tackle them, so I organize prioritized tasks in a trello for the week. But I waste so much time with transfer tasks.

Furthermore, it is always exhausting to jump between projects and go from an appointment with customer A (e.g. Microsoft Environment) to an appointment with customer B (e.g. AWS Environment). In addition, I have learned to delegate tasks in the meantime and then in the middle of working on project 1 a colleague comes to me with a showstopper question on project 2 which has to be answered.

Do you have a good approach on how I can manage my tasks efficiently? Do you do single days per project for example Monday - project A, Tuesday - project B,... and how do you organize that so you can keep track of things?

Update 26/08/20: The management knows about it and is also recruiting. But that is very difficult at the moment because we are in a region with many big players. We have already set up a role model together with the management, which actually sees me at the back of the line and reserves me for the difficult cases, while the technical colleagues work away the operative tasks such as configurations.

I think the most important thing would be a tool to bring order to the tasks first and then I would have to successively find the tasks that I can delegate without spending a lot of time or that are large enough that it is justified to train an employee in the project. As a second step, after my vacation, I would then no longer get involved in all projects, but leave the simple cases with the colleagues who replaced me on vacation. Is this going in the right direction?

Answer 1

Try to bring the work to you

I would suggest to create a Kanban board for yourself and allow people the option to give you work. Have columns like:

To do| In progress | ... | Done 
-----|-------------|-----|------
     |             |     |

You take work from the top of the "To do" column and you work on it. Once it's done or you have more capacity, you take some other ticket from the top of the "To do" column. People on the various projects can only change what's in the "To do" column. They decide what work is needed, they meet together and set priorities, they are the ones that will place items in the "To do" column.

You just let everyone else fight for their chance of using you in their projects, and you don't care about anything else than for work to show up in the "To do" column. When there are not enough tickets there you just let everyone know and telling them to add more tickets.

You keep everything visible, you keep everything transparent, communicate clearly, set proper WIP limits on each column, then focus on your work. By visualizing the work you can later figure out how everything is going, where are the pain points, how you can improve, etc.

Of course, this would be the ideal case. To let others figure out how you can help everyone, and let them organize between themselves to get access to a shared resource. Because this is the problem. You are a shared professional between different projects. It's not really your problem, it's the projects' problem.

The other option is obvious:

Have copies of yourself

That can be done by you training others to do you job, so they don't have to share you, or for the company to hire more people with your skills and then split the load between more people.

Both options will have their pros and cons for you and for everyone else, but something must be done because you can't juggle with 6-7 projects for too long. You will burn out and things will fall through the cracks.

Answer 2

It's pretty easy. First thing you have to understand that everybody considers you a free resource. Nobody cares what you do for other projects as you are free. That is why it's easier to dump a task to you then to do it themselves. You should follow those simple steps (you need some task management system for that like Jira or Trello):

1. Start the formal process of accepting the tasks. Correctly structured task can save you a lot of time. If the task is not correct - reject it immediately. Make those putting tasks putting effort in saving your time.

2. Set a cost for yourself with your management. Let's say if a person requesting a task they have to bring the X amount of money to the company in X time or they would be penalized. So for example, if a person requests new authorization system for the site, they need to say that it will bring 1 200$ within one year the project is done, or 100$ per month.

2.1 You say you need to spend 4 days to make this system rolling, and let's say you make 50$ per day.

2.2. So the cost of this module is 200$ and it will make 1 200 in one year.

3. This is your prioirty factor. Just range the tasks based on what it will make for the company. And YES everyone who makes a task has to commit to additional revenue. Because it's business you know, it's all about money.

People will be hesitant to that, as you share the responsibility with them. So if they want you to switch projects, why not? You say it will take you:

3.1. Two days to finish current project at logical breakpoint

3.2. 4 days develop new task

3.3. 2 days get into previous project again.

4. In the end it's all about money. If people are ready to invest their commitment and be help responsible for revenues, they will start thinking before making a task.

4.1. All prioritization will be natural

4.2. Your boss will be happy that you care about his money.