For many organizations, portfolio planning happens once a year or once a quarter and consists of hours of preparing, evaluating [read: arguing] and justifying project investments. At the end of it all, the plan is well thought out, extremely thorough and in line with business goals. Success.<\/p>\n
Or is it? As soon as the plan goes into action and projects kick off, you begin getting requests for items not on the list. As you trudge on, determined to stick to the plan, you start to realize some of these requests are valid and should have been included in the plan. So you slip a few extra projects in, and before you know it the whole team is detoured – projects are taking longer and resources are stretched thin. Now you you can\u2019t justify saying \u201cno\u201d to other projects that come along because they are all just as important.<\/p>\n
Consider another scenario, where resources are planned for each of the prioritized and approved projects. It\u2019s beautiful. You have all your resources inventoried and allocated at a perfect 80% utilization and projects are staffed in a timely fashion with the skillsets needed to deliver on time. This was no easy feat, but with careful planning, you\u2019ve made it and are feeling pretty good. Suddenly, a resource quits. Another gets pulled to the project they were on to fill in the gap and another resource is pulled to fill that slot, and so on. While you may have accounted for some of this, there are always going to be circumstances not in the plan – causing projects to fall off the rails.<\/p>\n
For these reasons and many others, resource management is today\u2019s biggest challenge; not just for IT, but for most any organization. Finding the right people with the right skills to get the job done, maintaining those resources, and keeping them engaged to deliver mission-critical projects is a core challenge for every business in today\u2019s competitive market. According to Forrester Research, on a scale of 1-5 (5 being \u201cwell defined\u201d), only 32% of PMOs rank above a level 3 noting \u201cinconsistent use, some definition\u201d for forecasting<\/em> resource capacity in the PMO. Only half of those PMOs are able to monitor performance<\/em> above that\u00a0level 3. If less one-third of organizations are able to forecast resource capacity, what actions can be taken when red flags are identified? This indicates the shortcomings of traditional resource planning approaches and quite simply they just don\u2019t work anymore. Too many changes take place by the time a well thought out plan goes into action, at least some level of agility needs to be worked into the plan. Over 50% of organizations are actively adopting agile project management to support agility in the development process, it is also time to introduce agility into the planning process. Without agility, resource forecasting is done in a silo and will not be effective.<\/p>\n One way to overcome the resource planning challenge is by measuring outcomes, not activities. When driving toward customer satisfaction, what matters is the end result, and the activities are just the means to the desired results. To ensure portfolio success, planning must focus on resources at the portfolio level. \u00a0This requires a lot of iterative planning and readjustment to ensure resources are always aligned with the goals of the organization.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here are five ways to improve your resource planning:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Effective resource planning requires a different approach. Don\u2019t be afraid to incorporate agile principles into your planning strategy and keep focus on the outcomes of the project. Project resource planning is tough; but it\u2019s not going anywhere. Projects will always need to be staffed, and the best managers will find a better, more effective way to staff their projects and deliver the results.<\/p>\n\n