The Problems of Multitasking An eastern U$.$S$.$

financial services company found itself

way behind schedule and over budget on an

important strategic program. Both the budget and

schedule baselines had begun slipping almost from

the beginning, and as the project progressed, the lags

became severe enough to require the company to

call in expert help in the form of a project

management consulting firm. After investigating the

organization's operations, the consulting firm

determined that the primary source of problems both

with this project in particular and the company's

project management practices, in general, was a

serious failure to accurately forecast resource

requirements.

In the words of one of the consultants, "Not enough

full$-$time $[$human$]$ resources had been dedicated to

the program." The biggest problem was the fact that

too many of the project team members were working

on two or more projects simultaneously$-$a clear

example of multitasking. Unfortunately, the program's

leaders developed their ambitious schedule without

reflecting on the availability of resources to support

the project milestones. With their excessive outside

responsibilities, no one was willing to take direct

ownership of their work on the program, people were

juggling assignments, and everyone was getting

farther behind in all the work. Again, in the words of

the consultant, "Project issues would come up and

there would be nobody there to handle them $[$in a

timely fashion$]."$ Those little issues, left unattended,

eventually grew to become big problems.

The schedule continued to lag, and employee morale

began to bottom out. Following their recognition of

the problem, the first step made by the consultants

was to get top management to renegotiate the work

assignments with the project team. First, the core

team members were freed from other responsibilities

so they could devote their full$-$time attention to the

program. Then, other support members of the project

were released from multitasking duties and explain answer of it how does multitasking confuse the resource availinity of project personel with full explaination and summary step by step explanationassigned