From tunnel to funnell: Addressing project overload in a demanding, multi-project organization

In today\u27s competitive and demanding business landscape, more and more organizations are adopting a project-based organization structure in order to improve the agility of delivering products and services. The dynamic and exigent nature of such organizations prompt business units to employ multiple projects concurrently. As such, it becomes common occurrence for companies to work on more projects than they can adequately handle at the same time, which ultimately results to project overload. An overwhelming workload often results to loss of focus and efficiency, workplace stress, and burnout and usually manifests itself in subpar work quality, schedule slips, and slow resource assignment. Through constant collaboration with stakeholders by means of formal meetings and casual interviews, it was established that project overload is a known and recurring issue at the Customer Experience Design (CXD) department of ABC Company. Consequently, this Action Research paper aimed to address project overload in the said business unit through adoption of project prioritization and workload & resource monitoring systems. Guided by the Project Portfolio Management framework and understanding of Demand Management, Project Time Management and Dependency Management, the interventions were constructed, planned, implemented and evaluated through the collaborative efforts of stakeholders. The interventions that were taken proved to be effective as preliminary steps in addressing the manifestations of the underlying issue. Moreover, the actions implemented acted as springboards toward the continuing pursuit of maintaining a balanced project pipeline