My company is trying to come up with an effective way to provide resource planning across all projects. We are small and new at formal project management and this has been a struggle across all projects. There are about 15 projects going on currently; however, the same people seem to be involved in most of the same projects based on department. Work is across two buildings and communication has been a struggle. Does any one have an effective template that they have used for resource planning? One PM has started to use a bi-weekly time-sheet to estimate who is working on their projects and how many hours, but that still is not solving across all of the projects.
Any template example or advice would be great! Saving Changes...
arlene trimbleAssistant IT Director| Local GovernmentAlamo, Ca, United States
Human beings can multi-task up to a certain limit although in the strictest sense, doing multiple jobs require pausing the previous task to focus on the next competing task. This is how our brain works. There is no absolute multitasking. Studies have shown that performance will start to go down if there are multiple tasks. Saving Changes...
Deepa KalangiManager, Program Management, Author, Trainer| CVS HealthCharlotte, NC, United States
What you can do, a suggestion:
If you are using clarity or similar timesheet system, take past 6 weeks averages(run a report) of what the resources in need were capacitated upto, and also seek estimates of the hours they have left for the future 6 weeks, capture in a spreadsheet. Keep updating it until you arrive at a consensus of who is doing what and how many hours are expended. You can kinda come to a resource leveling stage and then allocate them accordingly. For larger teams, I would usually seek the functional managers on their capacities and identify Critical Path activities first to determine if that resource has capacity to work on that activity to ensure the project is still moving and the resource can support. Saving Changes...
Kameswaran PandianEngineering Team Leader - Electronics| Rotork ControlsChennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Have you looked at ]Project-open[?
It can be setup easily enough by your IT team on a local server and you can add projects where the team should be able to record efforts. There are several modules which should allow you to do what you intend to do I'm sure! Saving Changes...
Shivanjali BhutkarBringing Technology and Business togetherNa, Ca, United States
yes there are some templates as mentioned above. However, is there any priority of projects defined in your org? Usually resources are aligned to priority projects first. So it's not so hard to deal with same resource pool. Saving Changes...
Not sure, if you still need a solution. Templates available from projectmanagement.com would be perfect place to start.
I would also recommend exploring COTs Project Portfolio Management Systems offered in cloud (SaaS) envn. Many of these packages capture best PM practices (similar to the leading ERP implementations) and costs lower than the in-house infrastructure investments, easier and quicker to get going and trained resources could be easily available for a quick rollout. Saving Changes...
Paul HollingsIT Project Manager| Self EmployedHerne Bay, Kent, United Kingdom
You should probably also address this from another angle as well, review all the projects and prioritise them. If resources are splitting their time across too many projects they may become less efficient and productive than they would otherwise be. By prioritising you may be able to postpone (even by a few days/weeks) and find some quick-wins. Together these may enable you to clear the decks of some of the workload and allow a more effective focus on current activities.
Going forward you need to precede resource planning and allocation with capacity planning to avoid these situations in the future.
See if you can get a small amount of funding to assess software tools, they are designed to help with exactly these issues, and for a small number of users are not very expensive. Saving Changes...
Diwakar KillamsettyAssociate Director| Capgemini EngineeringHyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India
Your description is a part of the problem your org is facing.
Hire a PM consultant for a while to deep dive and come up with a solution. This will help the current situation and future growth. Saving Changes...
I usually love Templates, and on the PMI website you can find almost everything. But the best solution may be something deeper, like Microsoft Project. It allows you to:
Identify resource allocation problems By reviewing resource information, such as assignments, over allocations or underallocations, resource costs, and variances between planned and actual work, you can verify that resources are optimally assigned to tasks to get the results you want
Manage shared resources After you've added enterprise resources, review or change shared resource information to make sure your project is as flexible and cost effective as possible.
Export project data to Excel for further analysis . For example, you can export information from earned value tables to Excel, and then display the information using sparklines in Excel 2010. Earned value gives you information about how costs are being spent and how work is being performed. Saving Changes...
You need to look at resource levelling. However, a few years ago when I started, I used MS Project for this case in particular and it works perfectly, but I am sure some easy software are there now for a simple workaround. Saving Changes...
Drake SettsuProject Manager / BloggerHi, United States
I would like to add that MS Project is good for monitoring over committed resources. I had resources spread across so many tasks and needed to make sure I balanced them out. Saving Changes...
