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Cross-portfolio resource management

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Alex Krause Director| Alvarez & Marsal München, Germany
Hello

I would be keen to understand approaches and best-practices for starting the journey towords resource management and pooling of resources cross-portflolios.

Context: Approx 800 PM-skilled people working across three portfolios in three clusters globally, and some more dispersed.
What are the mechanisms to ensure the highest-value projects are stagged?

Alex
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Alex -

Do you have a consistent, disciplined project intake process in place or is there a lot of stealth work going on?

How much multitasking (multiple concurrent projects per resource or multiple project and operational responsibilities per resource) is going on?

Has the portfolio governance leadership committee worked together to come up with a framework for prioritizing work?

Kiron
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1 reply by Alex Krause
Jul 17, 2018 2:53 AM
Alex Krause
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Kiron

Thanks for the reply and ypu are posing good questions.
1. The project intake process is currently being revised. Partiular emphasis on the definition of "what is a project" (and what does not warrant PM resources.
2. About 50% of the PM people work in a matrix environment.
3. Commitment is there. Now the processes need to be amended.
Alex
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Alex Krause Director| Alvarez & Marsal München, Germany
Jul 16, 2018 4:23 PM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
...
Alex -

Do you have a consistent, disciplined project intake process in place or is there a lot of stealth work going on?

How much multitasking (multiple concurrent projects per resource or multiple project and operational responsibilities per resource) is going on?

Has the portfolio governance leadership committee worked together to come up with a framework for prioritizing work?

Kiron
Kiron

Thanks for the reply and ypu are posing good questions.
1. The project intake process is currently being revised. Partiular emphasis on the definition of "what is a project" (and what does not warrant PM resources.
2. About 50% of the PM people work in a matrix environment.
3. Commitment is there. Now the processes need to be amended.
Alex
...
1 reply by Kiron Bondale
Jul 17, 2018 7:30 AM
Kiron Bondale
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To add to Girija's suggestions I'd add doing an inventory of what people are currently working on at an investment level (i.e. not activity).

Kiron
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Girija Ramakrishnan Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
Alex,
Based on Kiron's questions & your response, my points will be :

1. Since you are talking about multiple portfolios and around 800 resources (PMs ..), firstly prioritisation of the projects across the organisation & within each portfolio has to be done.

2. After prioritisation a roadmap needs to be created to plan the project delivery timeline at a high-level

3. These 2 steps would give an idea on resource requirements - with respect to number of resources, skillsets, duration of resources in each project and the time when they would be needed.

4. Based on your organisation culture and policies, you need to take steps to make staffing plans and follow it for resource assignment to each project.

5. In portfolios, you may share the resources based on the need & skills.

Hope my answer would help you.
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Jul 17, 2018 2:53 AM
Replying to Alex Krause
...
Kiron

Thanks for the reply and ypu are posing good questions.
1. The project intake process is currently being revised. Partiular emphasis on the definition of "what is a project" (and what does not warrant PM resources.
2. About 50% of the PM people work in a matrix environment.
3. Commitment is there. Now the processes need to be amended.
Alex
To add to Girija's suggestions I'd add doing an inventory of what people are currently working on at an investment level (i.e. not activity).

Kiron
...
1 reply by Alex Krause
Jul 17, 2018 10:25 AM
Alex Krause
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Kiron - glad to hear. This has been kicked off.
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Alex Krause Director| Alvarez & Marsal München, Germany
Jul 17, 2018 7:30 AM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
...
To add to Girija's suggestions I'd add doing an inventory of what people are currently working on at an investment level (i.e. not activity).

Kiron
Kiron - glad to hear. This has been kicked off.
avatar
Steve Ratkaj Ontario, Canada
Excellent question. We currently have the same issue with hundreds of projects and limited resources (actually insufficient resources at the moment in the hundreds). Additionally, we have the issue of having non-qualified PM staff which is being partially addressed via an internal PM certification program. We have a proprietary program(s) to help schedule projects based on "priority", available funding, cost of project, and project schedule. It is actually quite sophisticated, but from my understanding it does not address resource requirement/ availability. This tool was implemented in part to move away from an approach based on the decisions of an executive committee to that of an "evidence" based approach.

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