Project Managers can spend a great deal of time in constructing and planning their projects, including determining the resource requirements for each task in a project. Plotting out these resource assignments are typically the stage before requesting that a Resource Manager commit resources to a project. This is important as it helps you understand your current and future resource demand. But, how do you plan your resources? Overall by role and then you work out what they will do? Or do you list out the tasks and then work upwards to determine how much of each resource you need?
At Sensei, our team has worked with many clients over the years and found that they often struggle with resource management. The reason for this is because resources are humans and humans are complicated. Also, because they make the process too rigid, and it doesn’t fit with the culture of how they work.
To plan resources the options are top-down or bottom-up. Top-down means you create a plan of resources such as I need 3 engineers for 50% of their time for 6 months. You do this based on a rough idea of the effort needed. Bottom up means you create a schedule with tasks first and then you add up the resources from that. Let’s have a look at both and see how you can streamline each approach using the Altus platform.
Top-down resource plans
The advantages of top-down resource planning are that it is simple and is abstracted from your tasks. Many organisations manage resources separately from the detail of the initiatives they are working on. A person is assigned, and then later they work out how to tackle their tasks. Resource management is simply a separate function in these organisations. If that is how your organisation works, Altus provides you the ability to create resource plans on the top level without needing to first create a schedule.
There are advantages to this. The reality is that people are often assigned to a piece of work and how they approach that work really depends on them, their style, and what else they have to do. As a result, tasks get moved around, swapped, done part time, etc. If you try to keep a schedule up to date to reflect reality you may find you spend all day updating the schedule.
This approach works well where resources are full time on an initiative, if it’s an Agile team with a fixed resource pool and capacity to apply to tasks, or the work can be done part time, and you are only really interested in achieving the end date. The risk is that without linking resources to tasks you have no way of understanding the impact on resources if tasks move. And you have no way of being exact in how many days of a resource you allocate to your project. This can lead to resource wastage or under allocation.
Bottom-up task driven resource assignment
An answer to this can be to take an integrated approach to tasks and resources. The tasks are created, dependencies are used to link them, and you review the dates you need to make. Then resources are assigned to them. You need to determine what the resource needs are by rolling up a view of each role across all tasks. The advantage to this is that it is very precise. If you have specific skills that are in demand you can plan your limited resources in a more detailed manner. You are making a trade-off between efficient resource utilisation and the complexity of maintaining the schedule.
The good news is this doesn’t have to be complex. The main point where people seem to fail in our experience at Sensei is in keeping the schedules up to date. They often create detailed schedules, but if not kept up to date, then the resource forecasts are not accurate. Managers notice that because they look at resource heatmaps, which puts pressure back on the project managers and PMO to maintain the detailed schedule. This in turn creates another reason to keep resources and tasks abstracted.
The best of both worlds
To help you have the best of both worlds, Altus has now released a feature that enables you to create your tasks and assign resources to them in the Altus task tool, and then it will automatically roll those assignments up to create your resource plan for you. Altus now allows Project Managers to automatically create a new resource plan from a filled-out schedule with assigned tasks, saving time and reducing the chance of human error when creating the resource plan. You go to your project, create your tasks and assign your resources, and then go to the resource plan and have it automatically create the resource plan for you.
Benefits of this new feature:
- Effortless resource planning as you don’t need to retype resources once you have planned your tasks.
- Maximum control of the resources planned, as the tasks drive them.
- Eliminate manual errors as you remove double entry of the data.
- Create a resource plan in seconds from your schedule with the proposed resources column already completed.
You can generate both named and generic resources in your resource plan if you wish to request specific resources:
- Overwrite an already created resource plan if you make adjustments to your schedule prior to securing commitment from the Resource Manager.
- No more headaches with manual calculation of the hours per day, weeks or months, per resource. The algorithm takes care of aggregating all tasks per resource and executes a synthetic linear time phased effort based on the start and finish of each task.
- Introducing a reliable method to verify your schedule with assignments. Import your schedule into your resource plan, then review the consolidated effort per resource to ensure its feasibility before submitting to the Resource Manager.
If you are interested in finding out more about Altus and how it supports you to effectively plan for, request, approve, manage and report on resource allocations, all within a single platform, we are happy to share our experience across a range of clients and discuss how it could work for you.
Get in touch: letschat@altus.pro
