More than Juggling! Some Personal Insights on Managing Multiple Projects
Interview with Elizabeth Harrin, FAPM
Award-winning Author, Blogger, Speaker
Creator of A Rebel’s Guide to Project Management
United Kingdom
Interviewed by Yasmina Khelifi
International Correspondent, PM World Journal
Paris, France
Introduction to the interviewee
Elizabeth Harrin provides project management training and mentoring in-person and online, to individuals and companies. She is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management (APM) and was the youngest female Fellow at the time of her appointment.
Prior to becoming an independent practitioner, Elizabeth spent over 15 years in the corporate world, leading IT and business change projects across financial services and healthcare, including two based in Paris, France. She actively worked to engage stakeholders from across the business to ensure buy-in and support for change.
Elizabeth is an award-winning blogger and author of several books including Managing Multiple Projects, Engaging Stakeholders on Projects, Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World, Customer-Centric Project Management and others.
Besides mentoring, training and writing, Elizabeth speaks on the topics of stakeholder engagement, project management careers and productivity at events around the world – often via interactive online sessions but also in person. She has spoken for the APM and PMI, and IPMA Young Crew and given guest lectures at universities in the UK, US and Belgium.
She also contributes to a variety of other initiatives including sitting on the advisory board for the RISE Being Lean and Seen programme at Liverpool John Moores University.
Read more and get in touch via Elizabeth’s website: https://rebelsguidetopm.com/
Interview
Q1: First of all, thank you for accepting an interview request from PMWJ. Your latest book is Managing Multiple Projects. Why have you written this book now? What is different now in managing multiple projects?
Elizabeth Harrin (Harrin): My lived experience and research shows that more people manage multiple projects than single projects. Yet, if you read project management books or attend a course, you’ll learn about the end-to-end approaches for managing a single piece of work. That’s good. We need that. But we also need a practical approach for layering project upon project. That’s what I wanted to do with this book.
In 2019 I ran a six-month training and mentoring programme for project managers leading multiple projects that attracted 50 students from around the world. In 2021 I launched an online Mastering Multiple Projects course which had a first cohort of 81 students, and people continue to join.
This book has dropped out of my interest in this topic over the past few years, and is deepened by my understanding of the real-life situations project managers find themselves in. I wrote it for the people who have to juggle so many different initiatives that sometimes the workload feels overwhelming and who end up working evenings and weekends just to stay afloat. Because there is a better way.
Q2: What are the differences in managing multiple projects before Covid and in the post Covid era?
More…
To read entire interview, click here
How to cite this interview: Khelifi, Y. (2022). More than Juggling! Some Personal Insights on Managing Multiple Projects, Interview with Elizabeth Harrin, FAPM, PM World Journal, Vol. XI, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/pmwj121-Sep2022-Khelifi-Interview-with-Elizabeth-Harrin-2.pdf
About the Interviewer
Yasmina Khelifi
Paris, France
Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI- ACP, PMI-PBA is an experienced project manager in the telecom industry. Along with her 20-year career at Orange S.A. (the large French multinational telecommunications corporation), she sharpened her global leadership skills, delivering projects with major manufacturers and SIM makers. Yasmina strives for building collaborative bridges between people to make international projects successful. She relies on three pillars: project management skills, the languages she speaks, and a passion for sharing knowledge.
She is a PMP certification holder since 2013, a PMI- ACP and PMI-PBA certification holder since 2020. She is an active volunteer member at PMI France and PMI UAE, and a member of PMI Germany Chapter. French-native, she can speak German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and she is learning Arabic. Yasmina loves sharing her knowledge and experiences at work, in her volunteers’ activities at PMI, and in projectmanagement.com as a regular blogger. She is also the host and co-founder of the podcast Global Leaders Talk with Yasmina Khelifi to help people in becoming better international leaders.
Yasmina can be contacted at https://yasminakhelifi.com/ or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasminakhelifi-pmp-telecom/
Visit her correspondent profile at https://pmworldlibrary.net/yasmina-khelifi/
