Introducing Resource Management - The Project Group

Introducing Resource Management How to do it quickly and be successful by Johann Strasser, TPG The Project Group

Personnel resources are a limited commodity in most companies. Companies therefore need to optimize the way they manage their internal and external resources. However, introducing resource management successfully often seems complex. It involves optimally controlling how all teams and their members are utilized and requires structured organization, individualized processes and suitable tools. This article describes a new approach starting with team leaders when introducing resource management. It helps to optimize team planning, to provide a complete overview of team members and their tasks, and to quickly resolve scheduling conflicts.

Figure 1: Roles and methods in resource management

Why you should start with a complete resource planning When introducing Project and Portfolio Management (PM / PPM), most companies consider resource management to be the main objective or at least an important sub-objective, whereby they usually first focus on the PM methods, processes and tools for the project managers. Resource planning is also frequently considered to be complicated, •

because project managers themselves are often unable to accurately plan who is actually needed in the project and when

•

and the availability of internal employees in particular is mostly unpredictable.

Resource planning appears again when we discuss project portfolio management (PPM). Apart from initiating and prioritizing projects, this also includes the clarification of predictive feasibility within the scope of actually available resources. This time, however, not at a personal and task level but on project and skills or team level.

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Figure 2: Project managers request resources, team leaders secure them depending on availability

Comprehensive resource planning The most important question is always the same: Who can be assigned when with which availability in which project? However, you can only answer this question correctly if you really know the activities of all people and teams. Unfortunately, although some project managers do assign their resources, they do not plan them at all or not with the right tool. And various team leaders will do anything to ensure that nobody gets an insight into internal activities. This allows them to live an undisturbed and quiet life on their lonely island, where they can play hide-and-seek. Does this sound hopeless? That depends on your approach, who is involved and how exactly you want and have to create the information base. Predictions about the availability of persons on an incomplete information base will sooner or later automatically •

result either in unpredictable resources conflicts or

•

in low capacity utilization and

•

economic inefficiency.

“For team leaders or all parties responsible for resources, the completeness of the overview of their resources and commitments in imperative and indispensible.“ But how else can team leaders answer availability enquiries? This will always require all team members to be contained in their resource overview, including all absences, all projects and all line activities. This is why most team leaders maintain their resource management in Excel. They can do it themselves and it frequently offers a good database for the teams. This is also easily and quickly used to apply a central tool.

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Accuracy of resource utilization The accuracy of resource utilization is not quite as obvious. It must serve sensible requirements and be continuously accessible with regard to its completeness. Accuracy initially concerns the level of activity detail but also the topicality of resource planning as a whole. The more accurate and frequent the planning process, the more elaborate it becomes. If you start with the approach that daily and more accurate planning also means better planning, you risk not being able or not wanting to maintain this planning effort on a permanent basis. Do you really think it sensible that you know what each and every resource is working on daily on an hourly basis? Or is planning projects or work packages on a weekly or monthly basis sufficient? The decision regarding the accuracy of resource planning is, among other things, influenced by: •

the number of resources and projects

•

the duration of the projects

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the expenditure during the projects

•

the complexity of the schedules themselves

•

the changing assignment venues.

The perspective from which one regards resource utilization is also relevant: •

Project manager (needs the resources per project process, per week or per month)

•

Team leader (needs the absences, line activities, projects of his team members per week or per month)

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Department manager (needs the skills of the teams across all projects and team activities per month)

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Portfolio manager (needs the skills from all departments across all projects per month)

The sensible accuracy also depends on the type of projects in your portfolio, because there are vast differences between, for example, minor IT projects, the development of vehicle components or of pharmaceutical products and plant engineering. Ultimately, you need to ascertain the profitable and affordable granularity of resource planning for your particular case.

“The premise in resource management is always the same: better to be incomplete and slightly inaccurate than to plan accurately and incompletely.“

For team leaders within a matrix organization, it usually suffices to know who is to work what number of hours in which month at project level. The project manager can plan the associated details in his project plan at process level and as accurately as required.

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Recommended procedure - pragmatic introduction You should therefore begin by establishing completeness with the least possible expenditure. And then, depending on experience, you can go into detail as required for your situation. The reverse is frequently twice as painful – you have invested far too much for far too long without anyone being satisfied at the end. You should also come to terms with the fact that this issue can never be 100% accurate anyway. Employees will become ill without notice, unplanned support cases, important presales activities and other issues also influence resource planning on a daily basis.

Common approach through project planning - clear disadvantages The introduction of resource management is usually planned within the scope of PPM, so that all projects are initially set up in the system. This is then used to read out resource utilization. The problem with this procedure: on the one hand, this is only possible if all projects are updated and, on the other hand, when the actual capacity to be used for comparison purposes is known. But how long will this take? How much time do you have to wait for it? Experience has shown that it can take more than a year until fifty project managers have entered their one hundred projects so that they can be used for resource management. The unfortunate side of this is that the quality of resource planning amongst the project managers can be quite different and fluctuates greatly over time, depending on how much time could or was intended to be invested for planning.

Figure 3: It usually takes many months until all project managers have planned their projects.

And even if all project managers deliver their plans as well as and as regularly as agreed: Because, when comparing resource utilization with the capacity, you still have the gap to activities unrelated to projects (line activities). Naturally, these cannot be planned by project managers.

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In practice, this gap is often simply closed by maintaining availability for projects in the resource pool which is reduced by experience for line activities or basic requirements instead of full capacity. So only 80% instead of 100% of the hours specified in the employment contract are actually scheduled.

The advantages of the new approach - comprehensive team planning The blanket approach of reducing availability described above is simple. It is pragmatic and even sufficient for some organizations and companies. But what if the estimated project availability of individual persons is queried in the event of conflict? And do you track genuine project availability in reality? Wouldn’t if be better to enter absences and line activities in a comprehensive overview after all? This would allow a well-founded answer to all questions regarding project availability instead of guesstimates.

Figure 4: Project managers and team leaders compare their data records with a traffic light system

However, this requires that not only project managers work with the PPM system. Based on the same resource pool, team leaders must also be able to create their own plans in their own tools, which are connected to the PPM system. In this case, team planning consists of • absences, •

general and individual line activities and

•

project assurance.

No worries, this is not about planning projects in duplicate. In the assurance context, this is about distributing the actually available resources in accordance with the enquiries made during the project planning phase. This usually occurs at project level on a personal, weekly or monthly basis.

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Details within projects are not planned by team leaders. This remains under the auspices of the project managers, which does make it easier for them to rely on which resources are available when and to which extent. Ultimately, both the project managers and the team leaders must be able to transparently negotiate resource enquiries and assurances. This serves to avoid or elegantly resolve conflicts. In every case however, both need their own database, with which they can work and simulate technically independent of each other but which they can still compare with the project plan. How else would they deal with postponed projects, if resource planning is only maintained within the projects, but any agreed resource assurance is not documented?

Paradigm shift - start with the team leaders According to their job description, most team leaders are obliged to plan and control the utilization of their teams anyhow. This makes them credible when facing their superior department managers. So why not shift the paradigm and delve into the subject of resource planning with the team leaders first instead of with the project managers? Team leaders have a large vested interest in having their resource planning under control. They usually hold their position longer than project managers. They therefore also have better prerequisites to stabilize the system. Team leaders can and must also create a complete resource overview faster, because it is difficult for them to tell their superiors that, although all employees may be well utilized, this is not easily seen in the utilization overview because the project managers once again failed to maintain all projects.

Figure 5: Team leaders usually have a good database, which enables the realization of quick wins

Ideally, team leaders use their own tools to upload the existing resource enquiries from the projects - aggregated into single lines - to their own overview. They then enter their own assurances.

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Team leaders will then amend missing but already acknowledged plans of their team members in their own overview on the actual project level. The effect: They do not have to wait for the last project manager and his delivery. They are connected while remaining mostly independent. And they can still create the required complete overview in the shortest time possible. Plus: As a team leader you can not only deliver an excellent quick win in the form of a 100% utilization overview during the introduction of resource management, but can also continuously con-vey the good feeling of always being in control of all resource assignment. Naturally, this brings up the argument of accuracy. This accuracy is lacking, if team leaders amend the plans of projects in single lines per month without detailed information to the appropriate resource. True, but it still suffices for the overview of the team manager. As already established above, it is more important to at least get a rough idea from all employees on which projects they are currently working or will be working on shortly than to leave gaps. Because these gaps will surely denote an incorrect overview, because it is incomplete. And it is only a temporary inaccuracy anyhow. Why don’t you as a team leader make future resource assignment to projects dependent not only on priority but also on planning quality? Then you can assume that most of the project managers will endeavor to improve their planning, with which they hope to improve the supply of resource assurances.

Introduction of resource management - summary We previously described the discovery that PPM systems, which are only suitable for project and portfolio managers, are insufficient for resource management by team leaders. This lead to the development of additional tools, which allow a significantly faster introduction of resource management than with PPM systems (refer to Figure 5).

The recommended procedure is: 1. Initiate resource management together with the team leader 2. Specify a suitable initial planning accuracy 3. Ensure a complete resource overview 4. Select a tool (also) developed for team leaders 5. Connect resource planning to project planning 6. Optimize accuracy on the basis of your new experience

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------More professional articles You may also be interested in the articles “How to reduce resource conflicts“ and “strategic and operative resource management“ on http://www.theprojectgroup.com/en/professional-articles or stay tuned and register for our TPG BLOGINFO Newsletter on http://www.theprojectgroup.com/blog/en

The author: Johann Strasser Following several years’ experience as a development engineer in the automotive and energy sectors, Johann Strasser worked in the field of project management for ten years as a self-employed consultant and trainer. During this time, he was a project manager for software projects in the construction sector and managed scheduling and cost management for large-scale building projects. He has been working intensively with Microsoft Project ever since the first version was released. Johann Strasser also authors articles for a variety of journals and is a recognized speaker on all project management related topics. Contact: [email protected]

www.theprojectgroup.com [email protected]

TPG is a registered trademark in the European Union and in the United States of America.

Copyright TPG The Project Group All rights reserved 01/ 2016 (v1.0)

www.youtube.com/tpgtheprojectgroup www.twitter.com/tpg_com (@tpg_com) www.theprojectgroup.com/blog/en