What is a multi-project timeline?
A multi-project timeline is the agency's calendar at altitude. Instead of one project's Gantt chart, it lays every live project on the same axis: shoot weeks, edit windows, review rounds, delivery dates, with the people assigned to each. The point is not detail. It is the shape of the quarter: where three shoots land in the same week, where the one colorist is booked twice, where there is a gap that could take a new job.
For a creative agency and production studio this is the view that matters most, because our work is lumpy. A shoot consumes a whole team for days, then the same people are free while an editor works alone for three weeks. A single-project view cannot show that pattern. A multi-project timeline is where it becomes obvious.
Why it matters
Why a multi-project timeline matters
Every overcommitment we have ever seen was a multi-project problem. Each project, on its own, was fine. Put together, they needed the same director on two sets or the same producer across three deliveries in one week. The multi-project timeline is the only tool that shows that collision before the week arrives, which is when you can still move a shoot, hire a freelancer or tell a client the honest date.
It also tells you when to say yes. A gap in July that the timeline makes visible is a job you can take with confidence rather than a job you take and regret.
In practice
How a multi-project timeline works in practice
- 01
Every project is entered as phases with dates and people, not as a list of tasks. Pre-production, shoot, edit, review, delivery: a handful of bars per project, with the key names attached to each. The timeline then stacks the projects, and the producer reads it two ways: by time (what is happening in week 14) and by person (where is the director across the quarter). Most tools color-code by status so that a late phase shows up as a bar that has slipped past its neighbor.
- 02
It is maintained weekly, in a short review. New jobs are added as placeholders the moment they look likely, so the timeline shows demand as well as commitments. When a date moves on one project, the producer looks at the ripple: the next phase of that project, and every other project sharing a person in that window. That ripple check is the whole discipline.
At RIOT
Multi-project timelines at RIOT
A relationship like Coach's, which has run for more than a decade across campaigns, sizzle reels, Coachtopia, holiday films and the Cannes Lions 2026 recap film, never exists as one project. It is a stack of overlapping ones, next to everything else on the board. Krova, our production software, holds bids, schedules, budgets and delivery on one timeline for exactly that reason: the question is never whether this project is on track, but whether the quarter is.
Watch out
What people get wrong about multi-project timelines
Too much detail. A timeline with every task on it becomes unreadable in a month and gets abandoned. Phases and people are enough. The second mistake is excluding the maybes: a timeline that only shows signed work looks free until three pitches land at once. Pencil in the likely jobs, in a different color.
And treating it as a wall decoration. It is a decision tool. If the Monday review does not move something because of what the timeline shows, nobody is really reading it.
