In the real project management environment there is not only the project.

In a typical company projects take up only 10 to 30% of the available capacity. This means that you spend a maximum of 3 hours per day on project work. All the other hours go operational stuff, business as usual. For the project manager this means that she has to make sure that her team members keep focused on the project. For the individual worker this means that they have to juggle with conflicting requests. Many times they have the feeling that they cannot do anything right. If they focus on the project the operational firefighting suffers. When they focus on operations they block innovations, strategic change, …

How to get out of this catch 22 situation?

• Reserve capacity on beforehand
  As a project manager you should be able to plan who should be doing what by when. Distribute this information as soon as you have it. Take care of updates later. It is better to let people know what they should be doing and then change the dates than to surprise them and say “I need your results by tomorrow.”

• Time management
  As a team member, apply the following simple time management technique: divide your calendar days in blocks. If you planned a project block do project work. Do not let anything take your attention away from the project. Some of us were born to juggle most of us were not. So focus and deliver!

• Consolidate
  Have a consolidated list of things to do. Put your project and operational work on one big list and execute the work on the list according to due date and urgency. A list like this also allows you to communicate your workload to your managers, team leaders and colleagues. It is a basis for discussing the day to day priorities in your work environment.

Hope this helps you to get through another project & operations day. Please comment if you have other techniques to balance project and operational work.