International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 2 No. 23; December 2012 88 Impact of Parallel Projects Management Sharyar Wani Mutasim Elsadig Adam Husein Osman Abdullahi Jamaludin Bin Ibrahim Department of Information Technology, KICT International Islamic University Malaysia Jalan Gombak, 53100, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Abstract The dramatic increase in the number of projects with the fact of increased stiffness in competition, the strength of enterprises faces a challenge to deliver the expected on time. Enterprises seem to be in dilemma regarding the implications of running simultaneous projects. Yet only a few have investigated the implications of parallel projects. The need of the industry is to formulate a model that will help them to face this challenge without really making changes to their structures. Therefore this paper aims to highlight the influence of parallel project management on project schedule, budget and product’s quality as well. To explore the implication, interviews were conducted among project managers from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) who represented different work sectors. There seems to be a consensus that handling more than one project at a time is a challenge. The findings of this study show that most of project mangers suffer from the problem of change of focus from one project to another. As a result, some projects do not finish on time, lack quality standards, and need extra budget. Keywords: Project, Parallel, Impact, Management 1. Introduction The benchmarks of project success - delivering on time and with quality inside the proposed budget are a strong challenge and a key requirement in the highly competitive environment that the world faces today. The success charts seem to be decreasing as achieving the benchmarks is getting difficult. While some businesses try to employ strong project teams for a single project lead by an experienced project manager, yet the achievement of success factors seems to be a harsh reality. In this time when project success seems to be a hard job for those managing single projects, management of multiple projects simultaneously seems to be an awkward concept. Yet this practice is already very popular inside the circles of management. Having all these factors in mind, businesses are trying to adapt better practices which focus not only on single project success but at the same time involving themselves in the multiple project management practice. The need of the time is to understand the impacts of this vastly growing practice and to understand its implications on the industry with the concept of proposing suggestions based on past experiences. Studies have already been conducted for studying the implication of normal project management but the issue of implications of parallel project management seems to be hardly addressed till now. The objective of this study is to investigate the reasons behind handling multiple projects in parallel and their implications. The next section will try to explore the work associated with this area in order to understand diversely to some extent the implications of parallel project management.