Less Can Yield More When It Comes to Resource Planning

See if this sounds familiar: Your organization greenlights a key project and assigns an ace team, only to have the entire project delayed because a crucial resource isn’t available when needed.

Or this: After enduring a frustrating project failure like the one above, your organization adopts a maximalist approach to resource planning. Suddenly, executives need to know the names of everyone connected to the project, along with time allocations down to the hour. After a year or two, it becomes clear that the model is extraordinarily complex and difficult to maintain. The juice is not worth the squeeze. So the company abandons it, and you’re back in the same place you started.

Both situations are common, especially in an era when technology enables over-the-top granularity. And it’s easy to understand how they happen. Resource planning can be an enormous challenge for a company and its project management office (PMO). This is particularly true if the PMO supports multiple or large portfolios. Many turn to software for a solution, but the processes and structure must dictate how the tool works, not the other way around.

Resource planning often gets the better of PMO leaders because the all-or-nothing approaches are too extreme.

There’s a better way: macro-level resource planning. It’s a moderate-lift approach that provides the insight needed to make smart portfolio-balancing and resource-allocation decisions. It helps set up your teams for project success and value realization without drowning them in tracking and reporting requirements.

Zoom Out to Dial in

The macro approach aims for a just-right, goldilocks level of granularity for effective resource planning. You want to build demand and capacity profiles that are broadly accurate. You don’t need the names of individual team members. And you certainly don’t need to understand how they’re spending every hour of their day.

What you do need is a list of primary functions in moderate to high demand across the projects within your portfolio—IT, marketing, quality assurance, and operations, for example. And you need a rough idea of the time required by each function to execute the tasks to complete a given project. The ideal level of granularity enables PMOs to estimate the average monthly demand for each function, so they can compare the average demand to the average capacity. Once that comparison is in place, dashboards can highlight hot spots, giving leaders the insight they need to take proactive mitigation measures.

This level of detail equips PMO and executive decision-makers with the insight to decide, for example, whether the company can add a particular project without taxing its available resources. It can also identify potential constraints far enough in advance to add resources or reprioritize projects.

Trust Project Leaders with Project-Level Details

Project teams need more granularity than that, of course. So that’s where the fine-grain resource demand detail should reside. As project leaders determine the specific qualified resources they need for their teams, they can clarify ambiguities in the macro-level plan. That could mean identifying that the operations role for a given project requires 75 percent of a procurement specialist’s time and 50 percent of a production planner’s time, for example. If that projection was higher than the estimate in the macro-level resource plan, the resource manager would update the model and refresh the dashboards to reflect the increase, as well as the need to determine impacts and implement mitigation options.

This macro approach highlights the importance of a well-established feedback loop between project management and resource planning. Also essential is senior leadership’s commitment to the process, including approval of recommended corrective actions.

Keeping leadership informed regularly and engaged when necessary actually prevents resource planning from becoming a large time commitment for them. While they are hands-on during strategic planning, executives probably are involved only in quarterly or semi-annual refreshes, unless a major event triggers an earlier review.

Meet in the Middle

Resource planning is a high-value component of project portfolio management, but it’s exceptionally challenging. It’s no wonder so many organizations ping-pong back and forth between an unsustainable granular strategy and a hands-off strategy that practically amounts to giving up altogether.

Companies that adopt a middle-road approach—macro-level resource planning—often find it provides the level of detail they need to ensure their projects deliver consistent, predictable value.