Are we missing something about the Resource Calendars?

Resource Management Scheduling

akash hedau Product Owner| Cloud Network Solutions Toronto, Ontario, Canada

As far as resources are concerned, there can be 2 approaches to its management:
1. When is resource the Required?
2. When is resource the Available?

In PMBOK (9.2.1.2), we can find mention of resource calendar to be:
A resource calendar identifies the working days when each specific resource is available.

But where do we have the calendar which suggests, when are they required? Are we deeming that we can not estimate when we may require the resources?

The moment, we define the project schedule, can't we also create a schedule of the resources requirements?
Rather than designing the project schedule as per the resource availability, why not do it otherwise? Resources do not form the Baseline in the project, the Schedule does. So, I strongly feel Project Schedule should dictate the Resources provision. (please refer "Estimate Activity Resource" and "Develop Schedule")
So, once the project schedule is created, we should develop a calendar as per which the resources should be made available.

Could not find any such document or concept under Resource Planning Process Group in PMBOK. Am I missing something here, or there is no such document?

Posted: Aug 16, 2020 4:50 AM

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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina

Aug 18, 2020 10:30 AM

Replying to akash hedau

...

So, this is what is the sequence I infer now:

Identify activities
Estimate activity duration(Ignoring resource calendar)
Create network diagram (tentative schedule estimate by simply adding the time of all these activites)
Apply resource and schedule levelling to create final schedule.

Also, we may never need to create resource requirement calendar because in Agile, the progressive backlog refinement and frequent changes will add huge redundancy in creating such a calendar.

Have I inferred correct? Thanks.

The common process to follow is:
Step 1: Estimate the size of the product
Step 2: Estimate the effort (man-months)
Step 3: Estimate the schedule or duration (calendar months)
Duration is qty of product / resource capacity.
That´s because it is important to have the calendar resource and the rbs (resource breakdown structure) on hand.

Posted: Aug 18, 2020 3:04 PM (Updated by author: Aug 18, 2020 3:22 PM)

Are we missing something about the Resource Calendars?

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