Situation: You’re looking to streamline resource management and schedule updates.
PM software vendors are constantly coming out with new features for their products. Often we like to get inside their heads and understand why they made the changes they did and how it really helps (or doesn't help) end users like you. Recently, we spoke with Chad Haftsorson, Vice President of Products at Innotas. He clued us in on the thinking behind the new resource workbench functionality they've just released.
Q. Prior to Resource Workbench, what were the top three types of information users were asking for related to resources? What was most important to them? What pain were they feeling?
While the priority varies from customer to customer, most of the organizations we work with struggle with three main issues around resources
1) What are my resources working on? For many customers, just getting the initial inventory of resource allocations to their projects and maintenance activities is the first step. This activity often highlights that in addition to having more projects in the portfolio than they thought they had, resources are also over-allocated to work on these projects. Once the picture of how resources are assigned across projects becomes clear, many of our customers realize that their project schedules are unrealistic (unless people really can work 120 hours a week).
2) Do I have the capacity to handle all of this planned work? As organizations go through periodic portfolio planning reviews and their annual planning process, the requests from their business users or customers invariably outpace the capacity of the organization. These customers need to compare high level forecasts for resource needs on upcoming projects to balance them against capacity of the organization. Usually, this just involves defining the types of resources needed (DBA, Developer, Analyst, etc), the timeframe, and the expected hours and/or FTEs. With this data for both projects and maintenance activities, customers can adjust the master schedule of their projects to align with their capacity, or they can augment specific roles in the organization to increase capacity before a gap is encountered.
3) How can I easily adjust forecasts? Many of our customers rely on team managers or a centralized resource management function to balance resource allocations against future work, both strategic projects and day-to-day maintenance activities. On a weekly or monthly basis, managers will adjust their forecasts (expected assignments) based on shifting business priorities or changes to project scope and/or schedules. These forecasts can then be compared to the actual hours and costs for the work to help in improved forecasting in future periods. In cases where the IT organization charges back work to the business, the accuracy of the forecasts is important for credibility – without chargebacks, the data is important to justify the headcount of IT.
Q. How did that translate into new functionality?
While Innotas has always handled the first two cases well, it was a bit difficult for managers to quickly update forecasts. As with most PPM applications, the project or application was the central focus, which works great for project managers. For resource managers with resources working on multiple projects, this meant the manager was required to open up lots of projects, find the proper assignments, and adjust. This required lots of screens and lots of clicks.
Our new Resource Workbench is designed for team or resource managers to give them a simple, single screen interface to see all of their resources and their assignments so that forecasts can be updated much like you would do when looking at a single spreadsheet. It also provides the resource managers with a simple way to find new work that needs to be assigned, whether it is coming in through a formal resource request or a more informal process. We expect this will make adjustments of forecasts for a typical resource manager at least 50% faster in Innotas.
Q. You talk about the system automatically building bottom-up schedules by assigning resources to an entire schedule, versus tasks. It seems like you would need to have a lot of data on people (beyond roles, to competencies, etc.), tasks (skill needs, etc.), and how they all fit together to make that work. How much setup does that require?
Our Bottom Up scheduling capability allows project managers who own their resources or know who will be working on the project to simply just assign those people to the project. Setup is straight-forward. Each resource has a role, and that role is used to build the summary at the project level for use with our Capacity and Demand screen. We provide a standard catalog of roles for IT organizations to start with, and of course they can configure that, or if they do not need the role information, they can simply use a single role across all resources. Configurable skills, competencies, years of experience, etc, are all supported as well for advanced searching and reporting, but it is not required. In the end, the level of setup required really depends on the complexity of the reporting that the customer wants to do.
Q. Beyond the tool, how does this information change the way that Project Managers interact with their Sponsors, Team, and Stakeholders? How does it affect the PPM view of things?
The biggest change for project managers is that they will have more up to date data to report on when it comes to resource forecasts and comparisons against actuals because resource managers can realistically update the data more frequently. For many of our customers, this will also mean that the PM can “offload” the task of updating forecasts to the resource managers – many times, the project managers do the data entry.
Q. What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned about managing resources during this process?
At the surface, it appears that customers manage resources in many different ways, but once you drill into the details, the use cases are all very similar. The main differences I see in IT organizations come down to whether or not they utilize a centralized resource manager for shared services resources.
Q. What’s the next set of functionality you plan to implement related to resource management and why?
Following on the heels of the resource workbench will be some interactive functionality for looking at different options for the portfolio against capacity. We will allow portfolio managers to compare a set of options (projects and maintenance activities) against their capacity to determine which mix provides the best value and will fit within capacity.
