What’s New in Project Resource Management (pt 1)

 

It’s time for another instalment of What’s New In the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition. Following on from my look at the Procurement Management knowledge area (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I’m now taking a look Project Resource Management.

I got so many comments and messages saying that you found it helpful to have a breakdown of the major changes in the new version that I thought I’d do another Knowledge Area. You know that in this column I try to focus on things related to project budgeting, financial management and accounting. Resource management is an area that has a huge impact on the overall cost of a project. If you can use your resources effectively, you can get the most out of them – and I don’t mean making people work overtime because their workloads are so heavy. I mean making sure that you don’t have resources sitting around waiting for work, and equipment in a warehouse taking up space for weeks before you actually need.

As before, I have to thank the authors of a free pdf including Asad Naveed, Varun Anand and others, for their comprehensive guide to what is new in the latest version. I have my own electronic version of the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, and I’ve drawn on that too. However, I can recommend their 130-page guidance document as it is helpful for pointing out the headlines of where things are different.

Ready? Let’s dive into resource management and see how things in the project management world are different with this latest update.

We’re starting with the first process: Plan Resource Management

The headlines are:

• The name of this process has changed, as might be immediately apparent if you’ve memorised the process names. It’s no longer Plan Human Resource Management but Plan Resource Management.
• Other changes are much in line with what we’ve seen in other processes – making the process broader and relying more on professional judgement for exactly what needs to be included.
• There’s one very interesting new output – more on that in a moment.

Plan Resource Management Process

This is the first process in the Knowledge Area. We’re in the Planning process group (as if you couldn’t work that out!).

Inputs

There’s nothing major changed for the inputs to this process although Activity resource requirements has been dropped. I think this is to do with the fact the whole process seems to be more aligned to not simply dealing with people any longer. By dropping the ‘Human’ from the Knowledge Area name, you can use the same processes to deal with other types of resources. And you might not need activity resource estimates in the same way for those. Having said that, we’ll see more about activity resource estimates next time. Watch this space…

The two new inputs are:

Project Charter: No real surprise there as this should include any pre-approved financial resources (i.e. budget) and a list of key stakeholders who are likely to be your main (human) resources.

Project documents: Again, this vague input turns up here. Project documents could include your schedule, from which you can derive what is needed when, requirements documentation, which also helps you determine what skills and resources you need, the stakeholder register for your people planning and the risk register.

Tools and Techniques

Organisation charts and position descriptions are out. I quite liked having org charts to rely on, but I can see that they aren’t the most brilliant source of information about people. Especially as now so many teams are flatter or self-organising. I would still recommend having an org chart for your project team though.

Read next: How to create a project organisation chart

Networking is also out. That tells me that the whole process is losing the ‘human’ element and focusing more on being about generic resources, which may or may not include people.

That’s evident in what has been brought in as well.

Data representation is the new technique. It’s a nice vague term but it includes things like:

• Hierarchical charts – all the breakdown structures (work breakdown, organisational breakdown, resource breakdown)
• Matrices – RACI would be a good one to include in here because it relates to what people are doing on the project and ties in neatly with resource planning and management.
• Pretty much anything else you want to include. Even writing things down in long blocks of text is a representation of data (not a very interesting one, but it could be interpreted that way).

Outputs

So what is that output I thought was so interesting?

It’s a Team Charter.

Team Charters are the kind of thing you do as an icebreaker exercise with a new project team. They talk about the values for the team, ground rules, agreements and guidelines for how you are going to work together such as any standards for communication.

The PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition says your Team Charter could also cover conflict resolution processes, meeting guidelines and decision making criteria. In other words, your Charter can become the guidebook for social interaction on the team.

The Human Resource Management Plan output has been renamed as Resource Management Plan, in line with the rest of the process.

Finally, project documents updates is a new output. We’ve seen this in other processes too. Depending on what you update, the project document updates we are talking about cold include the assumption log and risk register, but could in reality be any number of documents that get an update once you have done your resource planning.

That’s the end of this process. The Knowledge Area has a whopping 6 processes, so next time I’ll take a look at Estimate Activity Resources. Doesn’t sound familiar? It’s new to Project Resource Management. See you next time!