Resource Management - where to start

Estimating Resource Management

Sandra Atwood Project Manager| XPO Aurora, Il, United States

I am a new project manager (recently completed my PMP) and have been tasked with managing or overseeing projects for a team of 12. I have a list of projects that need to be complete but no visibility to resource management to see which resources I can plug in where. Can anyone recommend a source for me to go to learn more about tools for resource management when my company doesn't use any software for this situation? I was thinking there might be an Excel template somewhere or some other magic to help me manage resources across projects.

Posted: May 31, 2019 8:53 AM

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Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States

Jun 01, 2019 6:04 PM

Replying to Eric Isom

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How about a simple spreadsheet? I threw together a simple one in Google Sheets here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pB...dit?usp=sharing

It lists people, the projects they're on, and the number of hours per week that they are assigned to each project. It totals the hours per person, and has conditional formatting to highlight instances of overallocation and underutilization.

It would work well for 12 people (or even 100 people), as long as your focus is on the level of utilization of people. If you also need to be able to quickly see who is assigned to which projects, then I would reformat it a bit, and use a pivot table so that you can easily switch back and forth between views. (Or perhaps simply apply a filter to the projects column.)

Thanks for that submission Eric! That looks a lot like what I do, and the conditional formatting gave me some great ideas for my own team's spreadsheet.

While I often find that time spreads for PM's time on individual projects can be a waste because it can change so rapidly, the coloring does make a really easy way to see not just current capacity issues but also the future ones too. The numbers don't have to be either accurate or precise to tell the important part of the story.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. ~ George Box

Posted: Jun 6, 2019 9:00 PM

Muthukrishnan Ramakrishnan Automation & Validation Engineer| Automation & Validation Solutions Taichung, Taichung, Taiwan

You may find them in knowledge and tools section

Posted: Jun 7, 2019 12:09 AM

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Resource Management - where to start

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