Patrick DiceyManager, Customer Project Management| CentralSquare TechnologiesOrlando, Fl, United States
As a part of a PMO with ~30 project managers with thousands of open projects, new projects coming in daily, I wanted to hear some tips/tricks/tools any of you have experience with for analyzing current PM workload and assignment of new projects as they come in based on PM capacity. Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Some thoughts, Patrick, and congrats for your job.
1. With this many projects one target is probably to provide transparency, to put projects in buckets, prioritize them. The other target is probably to make most effective use of the resources at hand (30 PMs you said), which also may have different capabilities.
This is a classic case for project portfolio management. Make yourself knowledgable about it.
2. in a client of mine, having 400 projects annually, we identified the max 50 most relevant and delegated the rest to operational departments. For this 50 we established standards, reporting, support etc. and provided them with adequate PMs.
3. be aware that multitasking is inefficient and should be reduced.
4. If you lack resources, hiring gig PMs is a option
5. Sergio mentioned 15-25% of overall effort required for PM, my rule of thumb is 10-15%. The better the PMO supports projects, the less PM effort required
6. with such a team of PMs, you need to establish a common cause, otherwise you have a herd of individuals. Peer reviews may help, regular presentations about lessons learned, shadowing for younger PMs.
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1 reply by Patrick Dicey
Dec 16, 2019 2:27 PM
Patrick Dicey
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Thank you sir! I appreciate you sharing...
It does appear some prioritization to drive down our backlog of smaller projects in the near-term may be needed.
We are reviewing staffing based on the Capacity analysis, TBD what it will tell us. I do think some processes such as listed in #6 would be helpful and we plan to put those suggestions into place.
Saving Changes...
Patrick DiceyManager, Customer Project Management| CentralSquare TechnologiesOrlando, Fl, United States
Dec 13, 2019 8:51 AM
Replying to Thomas Walenta
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Some thoughts, Patrick, and congrats for your job.
1. With this many projects one target is probably to provide transparency, to put projects in buckets, prioritize them. The other target is probably to make most effective use of the resources at hand (30 PMs you said), which also may have different capabilities.
This is a classic case for project portfolio management. Make yourself knowledgable about it.
2. in a client of mine, having 400 projects annually, we identified the max 50 most relevant and delegated the rest to operational departments. For this 50 we established standards, reporting, support etc. and provided them with adequate PMs.
3. be aware that multitasking is inefficient and should be reduced.
4. If you lack resources, hiring gig PMs is a option
5. Sergio mentioned 15-25% of overall effort required for PM, my rule of thumb is 10-15%. The better the PMO supports projects, the less PM effort required
6. with such a team of PMs, you need to establish a common cause, otherwise you have a herd of individuals. Peer reviews may help, regular presentations about lessons learned, shadowing for younger PMs.
Thank you sir! I appreciate you sharing...
It does appear some prioritization to drive down our backlog of smaller projects in the near-term may be needed.
We are reviewing staffing based on the Capacity analysis, TBD what it will tell us. I do think some processes such as listed in #6 would be helpful and we plan to put those suggestions into place. Saving Changes...
Thanks for sharing Steve... when you say "Project Team Size" it sounds like you're talking about the total staffing of a Project Team, not just the PMs/PMO. That would be outside my scope, we have services managers,development managers, etc who are responsible for the delivery staffing. Sounds like a cool project though, I imagine for a 400 question questionaire you're working on projects int he $100M+ range. My gut is the solution I need as well will also end up being proprietary.
Yes, this is meant for actual project team sizes. We do have a PMO with about 30 staff. Our major projects are typically in excess of $100M, and anything less than $10M is considered a minor project, and is typically staffed with less than 10 persons. We currently have projects that have been identified with an associated cost in excess of $100B. Saving Changes...
