Accurate Resource Planning

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Estimating   Resource Management   Talent Management  

When I try and think of topics for writing, I always attempt to look at new elements and emerging disciplines. Things that will offer something new and hopefully spark some discussion. However, every now and then I find myself needing to go back to basics to address an area that none of us seem very good at getting right.

In this case, it’s about as basic as it gets--resource planning. I’m working with an organization at the moment that is frustrated because it seems to take far more people than anticipated to complete work. I want to consider in this article some of the things that I discussed with them. Many of the areas will be familiar, but perhaps some of the specific issues will be new.

When resource planning estimates seem to be consistently low, there are two likely factors at play--the estimates themselves may be overly optimistic, and the amount of time assumed to be available for resources may be too high. In most cases, a combination of both of these factors is at play, so let’s look at them in a little more detail…

Over-optimistic planning
When we are developing planning estimates, one of the most recognized approaches is to include experts in the process. That works well, but when we are talking about effort planning--the work that people will do--the experts are frequently the people who are actually doing the work, or …

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