need organization advice re managing multiple projects

groovygrl

My new role involves managing many different projects (around 15ish) that have different timelines, scopes, activities involved, a lot of different players, etc. They all have a few things in common (marketing needs, hiring needs, documentation of certain things) but I'm struggling to come up with a good way to organize myself & stay on top of all of them. I have a whiteboard divided into sections by either project or category (for smaller ones) and a to do under that, which I need to stay on top of, our dept has a shared inbox that we try to get all the related emails into 10 zillion subfolders for the projects & dates, we are planning to get a large whiteboard in our new office space that we can all use to communicate what has been done/needs to be done, but I need a better system for myself- in my office and on my computer. My predecessor did these extensive spreadsheets where she documented everything she did (like every email sent, received email, phone calls, etc) for certain big events but it drove the staff crazy & frankly I just can't get on board with that...

I'm hoping to order some supplies to color code things moving forward...

Anyone have great organization systems that work for them?

groovygrl

Estwd2:

Yikes! I personally would not be using a whiteboard or anything paper-related for that many projects. I'd look into so

rockychryslerb2010

For personal project management, I am old school and like to do lists and post it notes for day to day stuff, and project mgmt software to track the larger project plan.

For communicating project status and next steps, I would develop a one pager

groovygrl

rockychryslerb2010:

For personal project management, I am old school and like to do lists and post it notes for day to day stu

2chatter

A whiteboard would make me insane.  With how much things change, I cannot manage a project on paper.

I keep a running task list, sortable by project, in excel for myself.  It's really a souped up to do list with due dates, who is

rockychryslerb2010

groovygrl:

rockychrysl

1026pumpkin

I am usually working on 20-25 projects at a time, so I can commiserate!  What works for me is to have folders (and sub-folders) carefully set up on my computer and my email, and I try to set aside little blocks of time through the day to act on an

jcath

I've just started using Trello.com  It's free and has mobile apps.  Its like the idea of notecards but online...I haven't worked out all the kinks but it's helping at least organize all my thoughts.