The most important part of resource management

. . .assigning people to projects. I’ll admit, the traditional view of resource management is finding the right resources for your project. But how often does that turn into a fight for scarce resources? How often are projects approved and activated, but as the PM looks for people they aren’t available?

So, that would lead us to actually doing some resource planning! Many organizations will start charting out their resource needs by role during the initiation phase, giving them a head start on finding available resources. Let’s see, I need a PM full-time, 20 hours a week of a DBA, another 20 of a programmer, and so on. Of course, I’m already knee-deep into serious analysis work on the project, and may have already tapped out all the business analysts with all this initiation work going on. So, role planning is not the most important element of resource management.

Backing up one step further, PMOs are often called on to do capacity planning. Now we’re looking at the pipeline of requests and asking the question – How many can we take on? This will be based on an analysis of available resources in aggregate over time. So, if we have 10,000 hours/week of staff time, and 15% is consumed by administrative duties, and another 20% is consumed by support work, and a final 25% is consumed by non-project “enhancements”, that would leave 40%, or 4000 hours/week, for project work. Hooray! And if we currently have projects in-flight that consume 3000 hours, we can take on another 1000 hours of project work. So, let’s approve project requests with estimates up to 1000 hours/wk of work!

But wait! How do I know the organization is consuming those specific amounts in each of those buckets? And how do I know if the same numbers apply to my applications group and my network engineering area? And beyond that, when I do get back to role planning, how do I know how many hours the typical network office rollout consumes of a given role, like a network engineer? And when the PM actually lays out his/her project plan, how do they know how long a given task usually takes?

For most PMOs today, they rely on past estimates. That’s right, they’re making new guesses based on their prior guesses and hoping they’re right. Resource management must be the one area of business today where we don’t employ a feedback loop to measure our actual performance and use it to refine our estimates.

That leads us to the real “most important part” of resource management – time tracking. If everyone logs their time against all their activities, project and non-project alike, we’ll build that feedback loop.

Indeed, when I was at PeopleSoft, we had 2 years of time data. So, I knew exactly how much time our IT organization spent on individual projects, on projects in general, and in each non-project bucket. When we did capacity planning, I didn’t have to guess how much time current projects were consuming – I knew! For projects we did on a recurring basis, like simple application upgrades, we already knew the amount of each type or resource consumed on average based on the last 5 times we did it.

If you’re looking for the best way to get started with resource management, start by logging time – all of it! This will give you the data you need to build out a resource plan with confidence.