How to account for limited resources on multiple projects

Marcus,

I have seen many organizations fail in trying to manage resources centrally, especially when using PPM tools. Typically resources are overcommitted (seen 300% plan vs capacity), and resource owners are a engaging in a bazaar like meeting every week.

I would recommend to leave work allocation to the people themselves, empower them and trust them. But also protect them, so make sure you help them to shield of requests. I have used a bottleneck list on the portfolio level to identify the key resources (typically only about 5%), and allow them to focus and not multitask. And midterm build new people who can support their workload. CCM could do wonders here.

Hi Vladimir,

good for you, and probably you have helped many of those organizations to get mature (no irony here).

Without proper project selection and prioritization, resource allocation will fail, same with estimates which are not trusted. So resource management can only be successful after some basics are set.

In a survey available at IIL, it says
'Resource conflicts and work overload for critical resources were reported by 73 percent of respondents, with the U.S. commercial sector reporting 85.6 percent.' and
'Fewer than half of respondents agree that a consistent approach for screening, prioritizing, selecting and approving projects is defined and applied in their PPM process.'

Some other survey stated, that the most effective PM tool was indeed PPM, the prioritization part. So still work to do. And it does not go away with agile.