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According to PMBOK, resource management includes the processes required to effectively manage people in a project. Organizational planning, staff acquisition and team development processes can help individual projects, programs or entire organizations manage a portfolio of projects. Organizations lacking a resource management process struggle managing project demand with capacity. Organizations frequently find themselves accepting additional projects without the sufficient resources required to deliver the work pipeline. Adding additional work without considering the resource allocation results in poor project delivery, low quality and higher stress levels. Occasionally, project teams will spend extra effort to launch a project or complete a major phase; however, pushing project teams to deliver projects without sufficient resources is not sustainable. Applying a resource management model to manage the resources and projects in the portfolio is an effective approach to assess the impact of adding new projects to the portfolio. This series of resource management articles will describe an overview of a resource management model, how to build one, maintain the model and support decision making for the project portfolio. Background The following resource management model resulted from a need to manage a pool of 60 technical architects, system engineers and database administrators across a portfolio of 30 IT infrastructure projects. System engineers and technical architects frequently consult on multiple projects and are belabored with unplanned consulting requests. With the exception of a project list, the IT organization had little insight into the amount of resources working across the 30 projects at any point in time. The organization did not have an established project time-keeping system and did not leverage a central project portfolio tool like Clarity or MS-Project Server for portfolio management. The IT manager struggled with understanding the current work in progress, its impact to resources and how to effectively prioritize the growing backlog of project change requests. Every few weeks, the organization took on additional work due to “high priority” requests and the management’s willingness to “just get it done” regardless of resources. The management team solved these challenges by introducing a resource management model to manage resources and the projects within the pipeline. Benefits After adopting a resource management model, the infrastructure organization was able to accurately identify resource constraints and conflicts across the portfolio. The management team incorporated the resource analysis into monthly operations reviews and improved project prioritization with resource allocation. The organization was able to improve project planning and manage the resource pool to ensure projects had sufficient resources to meet project dates. By developing and managing a resource model, the organization had objective metrics to manage the pipeline and request additional resources. Previously, the organization was told to take on the additional work without any regard to the resource base. By sharing the objective metrics with senior management, the organization communicated when the pipeline was full and when resources would be made available for new project requests. Introducing a resource management model was not a cure-all for project prioritization. The organization was still tasked with delivering new project requests; however, the organization was able to ask senior management to prioritize their project requests based on objective data. If the pipeline was full and senior management wanted the work done, they needed to allocate additional resources to the project team. If additional resources were not allocated to the team, senior management needed to decide which projects would be stopped to allow the higher priority projects to start. A Closer Look A resource management model allows project managers to model their organization’s current work in progress and determine its remaining capacity. Often project teams are requested to accept additional work and initiate projects in addition to the ongoing projects, programs or operational activities. Project teams become burdened with the additional work load and project delays occur. Management may communicate their teams are overworked, but without the objective data to support their claims, the problem is a matter of perception. The resource management model addresses these concerns with objective data and resource allocation across an organization’s project portfolio. Planning tools such as spreadsheets and databases can be used to build resource management models. Centralized time keeping systems provide data for resource utilization analysis. For the IT organization described above, the organization used MS-Project to develop a resource management model. MS-Project provides several views to build and maintain a resource management model without the overhead of daily time reporting. Figure 1 provides a snapshot from the resource management model. Figure 1: Resource Pool Figure 1 depicts all 33 resources within the resource pool. The black horizontal line denotes the total number of resources available to the resource pool. The blue area curve represents the resource allocation while the red area represents resource over allocation. By analyzing the graph, the portfolio manager can conclude the resources have capacity in the pipeline although some resources are over allocated. Depending on the roles needed for the next project, this allocation may or may not be a problem. The resource pool can be filtered by project team to identify over allocated teams. In Figure 2, the organization’s project management team is displayed, indicating individual resources within the team that are over-allocated during April to December. However, the project team has capacity to take on additional projects. Figure 2: Team View Finally, Figure 3 identifies the specific individual in the resource pool that is over-allocated. In this case, the individual is over-allocated from mid-April until the end of the year. By examining the detail behind the model, the project manager can determine if additional resources need to be allocated to the project. In Figure 3, the resource is over 50 percent allocated. Figure 3: Individual View Microsoft Project provides multiple views of project data to support decision making. Once the data is populated in the model, the Gantt Chart view can provide insight into all the projects in the portfolio. Task usage and resource usage views can also be used to identify over-allocated projects and adjust the data within the model. Required Effort Adopting a resource management model requires top-down commitment within the organization. The implement model didn’t require daily time tracking or a central time tracking tool. On a monthly basis, team supervisors were asked to poll their team member for a monthly forecast of hour allocation. Each team supervisor spent less than an hour a month updating the forecast, and the organization’s PMO integrated the results into the resource model. A resource management model is only as dependable as the data supporting it. Resource management theorists would insist on daily time-tracking to track work progress and accurately forecast resource commitment. Attaining this level of resource management requires investment in central project management tools as well as organizational support to report progress daily. In lieu of a central project management system, a simpler approach that delivered quick results adopted a monthly forecasting approach with a desktop copy of MS-Project. Experienced MS-Project users already know the capabilities of the Resource Graph in MS-Project. However, even experienced MS-Project users will glean some useful information from the next series of articles that describe how to set up the model, use it for resource decision making, and how to keep the model updated. Stay tuned for next week’s article on how to build the model from scratch!
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