Project pipeline management for Supervision

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hello welcome back to another video presented by acuity ppm where today we're going to cover the best practices for getting started with resource capacity planning this is a hot topic and a lot of companies struggle but we're going to highlight some key best practices to help your organization get started with project level resource planning and rolling that data up at the portfolio level but as a reminder don't forget to subscribe to our channel because we put out great content that you do not want to miss that will help you better manage your portfolio and with that we'll start off with the basic question what is resource capacity planning we covered this topic in a lot more detail in our previous video on capacity planning but we want to provide a quick review before jumping into best practices so we're really looking at the availability of people to do work and comparing that against their forecasted utilization how much time is allocated for them to do work in the future we want to compare these two if people are forecasted to be to do more work than they've got available time then we're gonna have a resource risk and that prevents us from executing against the portfolio which then brings us to you know two fundamental questions when do we have capacity to take on new work that's a portfolio-oriented view looking into the future senior leaders want to answer this all the time when can we take on new work or another way of asking is can we take on new work successfully and then two is do we have the resources available to get our committed work done on time this is a project oriented view to help ensure that projects can complete on time both are valuable as we're talking about maximizing business value delivery that's the purpose of portfolio management and capacity planning helps us answer these two questions and we won't go into great detail but it's worth repeating that capacity planning actually involves a lot of moving parts and in this graphic we can see the portfolio related items and then the project related items as we'll cover in just a moment the foundation of all of this is good project planning there's no way around it project teams need to know how to plan effectively that includes defining scope their tasks estimating duration and estimating effort we'll come back to this in a moment but you've also got the need for strong communication and good resource management and then on top of that at the portfolio level we need to have good governance with leaders who know how to make use of the resource capacity information to make timely decisions we need reasonable quality data and we need individuals who can do the analysis and provide recommendations back to leadership so when we talk about resource capacity planning there is some initial setup and we've got four basic points here we'd encourage you to take a look at our our blog that goes into more detail on this but the first is to to define the resource pool and we would recommend to get started focus on those resources that are most critical not every team is you could say critical to getting project work done or another way of saying it actually probably a more politically correct way of saying it is there are a few key individuals likely your subject matter experts that are pulled in many different directions they are frequently requested for projects there's usually a handful of those individuals or a small number of teams that's the place to start you you may not capture everybody's information and some people would advocate you've got to get a full resource picture we would argue that to get started you can get a lot of value and actually make a lot of progress by focusing on a subset of your entire resource pool of those teams or individuals that are considered critical or bottleneck resources this will save you a lot of time and it actually can filter out a lot of noise i've seen companies collect lots of resource data and then really not know what to do with it so i can't say too much about defining the resource pool by focusing on critical resources then you've got the need to define your level of granularity some people would argue we need to go to the task level we need to assign people at the task level of our schedule and roll that information up so that we know a a week by week detailed resource plan very few companies can achieve that and so we would recommend a monthly utilization at the project level is going to give you a lot more insight than not having any resource data at all project level or maybe phase level information is about as low of a level as you need to go to get good enough data the goal is not perfect data the goal is good enough data to make better decisions for your portfolio also don't forget to carve out operational time you want to know how much time people are spending on their day-to-day work some individuals focus most of their time on operational work and have a little bit of time for project work regardless you've got to take account of operational time you don't have to account for every line item of all the vacation all their sick time all their training all their meetings email time etc generalize it about how much time do they need per week or per month for operational work this is where time tracking can be useful so you can track how much time do they spend on non-project work and then use that information to block out that operational time that will the remainder will be what's available for project work then you want to define how often to collect the resource information and so we'd recommend that you develop a high level resource plan during project initiation either in the initiation phase or project planning phase so this is an overview the best practices for the initial setup this is a graphic to illustrate part of what we were just referring to on the left we've got a top-down project level resource estimate we know that when organizations do their bottom-up planning their detailed task planning and maybe they roll that up the actual amount of time needed week over week will vary but for resource capacity planning purposes you don't need that level of granularity the reason for it is because organizations are not nimble enough to take action on that level of detail there's too much work it requires a lot of effort to successfully navigate or be nimble enough to to use that level of detail rather instead a project level allocation that might vary month to month because we thought we'd advocate for profiling your resource plans but you can get great information with the top down estimate and then manage your project based on your bottom-up planning so again there may be a disconnect but it's acceptable for portfolio planning purposes so we'll talk a little bit more about best practices starting with project planning this is the project oriented side of things you've got your project manager with the project team working together to plan your project and you have to take account of scope management scheduling and resource planning resource planning those built on scope management and project scheduling or the task you know the work breakdown or the the timing of when work needs to be done so you can pause and take a look at some of these key points but best practices include consistent planning in other words do it everybody knows that they should plan projects but not every organization does consistent project planning across all their projects get the people that will be doing the work involved in planning and get their help to estimate learn techniques that will help improve estimation over time another comment about time tracking there's a notion that if we track our time it'll help us improve our estimates this is if not a myth it's a notion that almost no companies can achieve everybody is so busy there's no time to go back and look at historical data and then compare that with their estimates and understand why they couldn't achieve all that it's actually very hard to do there's better ways of learning how to estimate and there's techniques that are available to help teams take a forward looking approach don't forget to communicate with the resource managers don't rely on software to replace good old communication keep it simple like we said don't try to estimate everyone's time resource plans should be developed in the early phases of the project the goal is good but not perfect data don't try to get the perfect data because it's likely never to happen i could tell you horror stories about organizations leadership teams that questioned the data and killed their portfolio management implementation simply because they were expecting perfect data and could never get it when they had good enough data that they could have taken action on so the goal is good data not perfect data we've already talked about not capturing granular task level utilization save that for when you're far more mature and can utilize it successfully another point teams often like to track skill sets which we'd agree with but when you're getting started trying to do skill based resource planning can be very difficult or at least to roll that up at the capacity level at the portfolio level that doesn't mean you don't track skills but trying to do that from a resource planning and capacity planning perspective is difficult so we'd we'd encourage you to start with role based planning i need a project manager i need a business analyst maybe you've got developers maybe they have a specific skill set developers might be an exception to that i need a particular type of developer but in general there's a lot of roles where you can get good information based on their role alone top-down's good enough monthly utilization's off often the right uh time span for resource planning now we've layered on some of the portfolio elements starting with resource capacity analysis and at this point all the project work is to provide resource data we can't do portfolio level planning unless we have good enough project data so all the work that the project teams do is to produce good enough resource data that can then be analyzed we'd suggest that the portfolio manager is the right person or the right team to do that analysis and as far as best practices you need somebody who's responsible for coordinating and analyzing the resource data there's coordination involved somebody that's working with the project teams to ensure that the data is being collected at the right time as well as analyzing that data so they need good data analysis skills they need oversight of the process they also need soft leadership skills for working with those project managers it's not always easy to get that data and so there's leadership skills involved with that they also should be developing recommendations for the portfolio governance team this is very important it's one thing to analyze resource data and create charts it's another thing to then provide recommendations to the leadership team as to what they should do or what options they should take rarely can the governance team which is you know your senior directors your vice presidents your senior vice presidents they don't have the time to invest in analyzing the data they need that provided to them and it helps them even further if they have some options maybe it's certain projects should be approved and certain others should be deferred or certain projects should be put on hold to free up resources for these new projects whatever the recommendations would be and then be sure to share this analysis and information as part of your portfolio communication plan we'll go a step further and now we're adding the joint capacity reviews this is kind of an emerging best practice of these resource councils where you've got groups of resource managers looking at the project requests resource requests likely these resource managers have received these requests personally but now this is an opportunity to look holistically across multiple projects and with a a broader group of resource managers have the conversations as to which projects can really be staffed and which ones cannot so that's the the essence of it and the resource managers themselves need to communicate with the project managers understanding the scope of work talking with their own team to match skills and interests they need to monitor the operational workload so that they understand the the availability for project work and then project managers should be established in that regular time to meet with resource managers i'd recommend that the pmo set up a resource meeting it is extra work and organizations that do it they realize it's an investment but without such a forum or a council it's difficult to get that group of stakeholders your resource managers together to have those important conversations which are so important before going to the governance team better to get the input before a governance meeting rather than finding out after the fact that that project that just got approved doesn't actually have the resources get the input from the resource managers in advance then we've got the actual resource decisions that need to be made this is at the governance team level this goes back to the options and recommendations the portfolio manager or managers are doing the resource analysis they're sharing that with the resource managers as a group collecting feedback and input and then they're developing final recommendations to the governance team with possible options we need more budget we need to change our scope and we'll talk about some of the options but this then gets provided to the portfolio governance team at regular intervals at those governance meetings for them to make decisions so this shows you kind of an iterative process the spectrum starting at the project level and then going across the portfolio level with the portfolio manager resource managers and the governance team and we've already started talking a little bit about what do we do with the data how do we handle over allocated resources well there's four basic answers and we'll touch on each of those one of them is to renegotiate completion dates this is probably the most common answer uh or one of the most common answers we'll just extend we don't have the time we just we want we're going to keep everybody allocated to their projects but we know that they're multitasking and so we're just going to negotiate and we're going to extend out the dates we're stretching out the dates it's not unlike the resource leveling it's okay but uh there's better approaches but you could negotiate new completion dates another idea is to put lower priority work on hold or to defer it this is an adjustment of the portfolio scope but it at least protects resource capacity you're not over utilizing your teams you could hire more resources this is to adjust portfolio budget this is not a easy solution it's an expensive solution and it can take time certainly you can bring in contractors and there's cases to be made for that you can see a shortage we know we've got a critical project coming that absolutely needs to get done we have the budget we'll get consultants and contractors in to do the work that's an acceptable option the last is the do nothing option this actually probably is the most common answer that uh senior leaders take they acknowledge overutilization and nothing changes they don't change the scope of the work they do or they expect the uh the work to continue and the teams just to work around it uh maybe they eventually renegotiate the dates but it's kind of like accepting uh the reality but doing nothing about it and asking teams to work around it these are the four basic options one quick plug for work intake is that if you've got a good work intake process you will protect your resource capacity one of the goals of intake is to ensure that you do not overload your portfolio you want to make sure that you let projects into the portfolio that can be resourced or you can find ways of resourcing them by getting contractors and consultants one of the worst things that can happen but it happens all the time is to approve far more work than your teams have the ability to execute against then you get into the trouble of missing deadlines and uh needing to ongoing you know renegotiate scope or renegotiate finish dates it's really better to protect capacity up front with a strong work intake process we'd like to share some exciting news about a q a ppm which now offers project level resource planning and portfolio level capacity planning in one one solution here we're looking at our resource planning at the project level that provides that top-down estimate it allows you to add roles as well as named resources which in most cases project teams know who's working on their project but it also gives you the ability to profile so you may have a top down estimate but you might need to adjust the month to month utilization you can then roll this up and we talked about kind of a resource dashboard which teams are available are at risk or over utilized we can display this and we can even filter on this and focus in on the teams that are over utilized and address those problem areas first this is an example with a common heat map showing teams that are over utilized on average and then at the top we can see how many teams have available time are at risk or over utilized and we can further prioritize this work or actually remove projects that are lower priority and see how that affects resource capacity this last chart shows us that we can look at the details underneath we can see the individuals and how much project work they're doing and how much non-project work they're doing we can see the relative priority and then if you're using the prioritization module you can also see what the relative value score and risk score is this information comes together to help inform whether or not projects should be d scoped put on hold etc thank you for watching if you learned something in this video click the like button and also click subscribe and you can visit us at acuityppm.com for a demo of acuity ppm we'd love to help you address your resource management challenges thank you