Resources are the lifeblood of any organisation, and every organisation has a limited number of resources at hand, no matter the size of the organisation. To ensure that your resources are used optimally, here are a few techniques which can be used.
Prioritise Projects Correctly
This means ensuring that every project you undertake has an appropriate priority, by comparing how it supports key business drivers (which themselves need to be prioritised and which should support your business strategy) against other projects you want to undertake.
Pro Tip: There should be only one priority 1 project in a portfolio.
Plan properly
Compile project schedules down to a level of granularity where you can assign individual resources or groups of resources. We use a standard approach for every deliverable consisting of five basic activities:
- A series of workshops to gain a meeting of the minds of the people needed to produce the deliverable (e.g. Business Requirements)
- An individual or group of individuals are responsible for drafting the deliverable.
- A different individual or group is responsible for reviewing the deliverable and providing feedback.
- The people who drafted the deliverable then update the deliverable based on the feedback from the reviewers.
- The person authorised to approve the deliverable then needs to approve it or send it back for rework.
So, our plan for producing the Business requirements would look like this:
- Business Requirements
1.1 Business Requirements Workshop
1.2 Draft Business Requirements
1.3 Review Business Requirements
1.4 Finalise Business Requirements
1.5 Approve Business Requirements
Pro Tip: This can be done iteratively in nature for large, complex deliverables.
This approach enables you to assign individual resources to tasks correctly, increases accountability, and helps to identify where delays are taking place. It also creates a good cadence for delivery and progress tracking.
Avoid assigning Teams to tasks, unless your teams are made up of individuals you can identify. If you don’t, you won’t be able to get meaningful resource utilisation reports which will show you which resources are over-allocated and which are not.
Level Resources
Once your resources are allocated to tasks, levelling resources within your project will resolve any over-allocations within your project. If you have prioritised your projects correctly, you can then level your resources across projects to eliminate over-allocations across projects. Tasks on projects with a higher priority will have first access to resources, then the next priority project tasks will have access to resources, until a higher priority project task is due to be worked on by the same resources, and so on.
Be aware that this process will probably extend your project duration, but the result will be more realistic project timelines, and happier stakeholders at the end of the day, because their expectations will be set correctly, and they will be confident they are undertaking the right projects in terms of the strategy.
Leverage Technology
Many Project Managers shy away from doing the above, but most good project planning software tools contain the functionality you require to achieve all these activities. We have used Sciforma and Microsoft Project Online, and both support this approach.
