Resource management: everyone is suffering

I was speaking at a PMI conference in Sweden, last March, which gave me the opportunity to sit in on a number of other sessions. This one is all about resource management, given by Peter Kestenholz.

If you are to be successful, you must have the right number of skilled people.

A straw poll of attendees at the presentation found:

• all work in a matrix organsiation;
• 30% have clear resource management process;
• 20% have tools to support resource management;
• only 2% have been trained on the process and tools.

All of them had BIG issues with how resource management worked (or more accurately, didn’t work)  in their organisations. Some ignored it and others had enormous spreadsheets to try and get a grip on the issue of making sure the organisation has the resources to do the work that needs doing. By enormous, I mean at the limit of Excel as a tool. Yes, most use spreadsheets. It sounds dreadful!

Way back in 2010, Forrester said that there was a significant increase in investment of PPM tools specifically to:

• Obtain an accurate view of resource usage;
• Manage investment aligned to strategy.

Today, Gartner says the need for resource management is still one of the top three reasons companies invest in PPM tools. Not a lot has changed. The vision of many senior managers is that they should be able to “drill down” to get any information they need at the level they need it. . . . but few can do this.

Peter has been involved in helping a lot of organisations tackle the “resource issue” and went through a number of things to consider, namely:

1. Have an executive sponsor define the business requirements for resource planning and transparency. Understand the rationale. Without this, don’t bother any further as this drives everything else.
2. Be clear on what you mean by resource capacity. Net? Gross? Overtime? What is a FTE? What formula will you use for any calculation of resource capacity?
3. Ensure, a person can have many skills associated with him/her.
4. HR should own the Organisation Breakdown Structure; hold them to account for keeping it up to date. An out of date structure will break your process. Ensure any tooling can cope with the continuous churn of organisation structures and people allocations.
5. Decide how many different jobs a person can be forecasted to work on. Be clear if people can be asked for by name? by role or by skill (or  any of these).
6. Get rid of your spreadsheets! However, people are used to using these, so consider tools with a similar (and hence familiar) look and feel.
7. Ensure your approach deals with leavers and joiners. For example, be able to forecast a person’s assignment even though they haven’t joined the organisation yet.

You can read more about enterprise wide resource management and tooling in Chapter 14 of The Programme and Portfolio Workout.