Here are three typical key questions about your business:
• Do you have a complete picture of the demands being made on the business?
• Do projects come from nowhere and do you have the capability to deliver on them?
• Are you able to quickly reprioritise resources?
Project driven organisations are often caught in a situation where project resource demands are coming at them from many different directions. Many organisations are simply ill-equipped to deal with these pressures.
Rather than focusing on what is best for the business as a whole, managers are caught in a resource management game of cat and mouse. Many are forced to manage their resources via verbal networking and informal bartering. These informal processes limit the ability to optimise staffing levels, which inevitably leads to lower utilisation rates, skills shortages and lower profitability. Achieving an equitable balance between resource supply and project demand is a significant issue for successful management of the Project Portfolio Management process.
The greatest problem for many is that they rely on home grown manual systems or numerous spreadsheets to
achieve this.
Such systems hamper the business, preventing it from:
• effectively assigning the right resource to the right job
• understanding whether the business has the capability to take on new projects
• ensuring that resources are working to drive the businesses strategic goals
• managing the planning horizon and model multiple resource scenarios
• identifying operational resource bottlenecks
Within all organisations, resource demands will usually exceed supply and there are always too many projects and not enough resources to carry them out well. However, many project selection methods and processes do a poor job of resource balancing because they do not understand the business’s capability to take on new projects. Many organisations simply consider individual projects one at a time and on their own merits, with little regard for the impact that one project has on the next. Worse yet,
people resources are assigned to projects, but only later is it discovered that the same resources are committed to multiple projects, and that the same people are over-allocated. In essence projects are evaluated with no strategic view in mind, ‘go’ decisions are made and resource implications are often not factored in. This cascades down the pipeline. Gridlock ends up plaguing many project portfolio processes simply because they lack visibility of and control over their resources.
For a PPM process to be successful, the organisation needs this visibility of and control over resources in order to ensure that it has the right people on the right jobs at the right time. Effective PPM is about the ability to view resource allocation across all projects, programmes and portfolio and also have the ability to reallocate these resources to more critical activities and to factor this into any forward planning.
In order to better understand your business’s capability, three key components need to be factored into organising for PPM:
• A single integrated resource and skills database: It is essential that the PPM implementation is designed to handle automatic resource allocation, facilitated by an underlying skills database drawn from a
single data source.
• ‘What if’ scenario capability analysis: Advanced scenario modelling provides the ‘what-if’ capabilities to examine multiple scenarios so as to help fine-tune assumptions about projected resource usage, performance and milestones, and is essential to planning and forecasting the future direction of the project portfolio. This allows resource plans to be tested for feasibility, matching against skills, competencies, experience and availability. ‘What if’ scenarios give the portfolio process the ability to match supply and demand and clearly demonstrate to the rest of the business where potential shortfalls exist.
• Dashboard visibility of resources: PPM needs to deliver dynamic visibility by aligning resources with organisational capacities. Dashboard visibility, as outlined earlier, enables the business to drill down and drill up though capability management data by allowing all relevant roles and layers of management to efficiently measure and monitor in real time the business’s internal and external resources demands. Dashboard visibility allows you to receive automatic notifications on
work slippage, capacity issues, and other concerns while extending
