Project Partners Blog

Challenges

Determine if you have a demand or supply oriented environment

• Demand resource management is more prevalent with internal resource organizations, i.e. IT organizations. The primary focus is to assure that resources are optimally allocated to projects in keeping with the organization’s stated goals and objectives. Or, in other words managing the problems of “everybody is over-booked” or “there’s more work than resources”.
  
• Supply resource management tends to be more attuned to billable professional resources. The primary focus is in balancing staff retention, skill mix and gross margins by assuring that resources are optimized to their maximum capacity. Or in other words “Is everybody billable?” or “Do we have enough analysts or too many designers?”
  
• Professional services and other resource intensive organizations may have both issues at the same time
  

Solutions

Identify/classify your resources

1. HR & PA Jobs
   
   1. “Billable” staff – know who are the resources you must schedule and track to assure success
      
      1. Billable staff are your most directly productive staff members and are critical to the success of a project. Plus they are generally the key indicator for forecasting project revenues
         
      2. Support Staff are important but generally are resources with less critical skill requirements and/or are in abundance and easy to fill
         
   2. Job Levels
      
      1. It is important to know who your senior resources are – whether senior is position, skill level or other management determination
         
      2. Generally denotes resource cost so Job levels help in optimizing performance and profitability/efficiency
         
2. Competencies
   
   1. Skill classification – Primary focus:
      
      1. Demand – Finding qualified people to do assignments who generally do ‘other’ work to balance workloads.
         
      2. Supply – Assuring that your resource mix is attenuated to your organization’s needs
         
   2. Grading
      
      1. Demand – Assuring that project assignments are optimized with the correct level of expertise to meet the prioritization of all projects.
         
      2. Supply – Assuring you have qualified resources to meet the client’s requirements
         

Be able to classify your project requirements – Project Roles

1. Job Level – this will help to quickly narrow the field of potential candidates (see above)
   
2. Competencies – use mandatory competencies sparingly. Using optional competencies helps in prioritizing identified candidates.
   
3. Role Groups
   
   1. If you have a diverse workforce and require many Project Roles, create more Role Groups to minimize the list of Project Roles an individual project manager must deal with.
      
   2. Roles also help focus standardization of project requirements by eliminating ‘ad hoc’ project roles.
      

Matching Resources and Requirements

Automated Processing – Most important processes to make sure you are getting the correct resource data on a timely basis:

• PRC: Automated Candidate Search for a Range of Projects
  
• PA: HR Related Updates Workflow
  

Getting Started

General Suggestions

• Most small to mid-sized organizations know their resources by name – so placing them is pretty straight-forward using direct assignments
  
• These organizations aren’t searching for ‘hidden’ talents – so complex competency searches are irrelevant
  
• Mid- to large sized organizations rely more on job levels and or competencies when identifying candidates for project requirements.
  

Demand Environment Suggestions

• Avoid micro-managing resource assignments
  
  • Effort involved in maintaining daily changes to forecasts is generally not time efficient
    
  • Forecasting will never be perfect – allow your variances to help determine what magnitude of changes are most important to track
    
• Establish minimum requirement guidelines – examples:
  
  • Try using a 20% rule: Only schedule resources to an assignment if it is equal to or greater than 8 hours per week
    
  • Ignore forecasting small assignments of less than 25% of time of a resource’s weekly capacity.
    

Supply Environment

• Be sure to track your variance reports of forecasted to actual hours
  
• Review your over-commitment reports
  
  • Overcommitments can cause bottlenecks on project schedules;,
    
  • Bottlenecks lead to missed deadlines or put pressures on project margins
    

Reporting

Oracle currently provides Discoverer workbooks and Project Intelligence (PJI) reporting. Review what is available before you design you own reports. While Oracle reporting out of the box is not always suitable, it can give you a great starting point to developing and/or conforming to your own reporting infrastructure.

Note:    If you are licensed to use Project Resource Management, then you are licensed to use the PJI Resource Reporting.

DISCO Workbooks – Staffing

• Scheduled Resource Hours
  
  • Simple: Capacity, Total, Provisional hours
    
  • Three periods
    
• Available Resource Hours
  
• Overcommitted Resource Hours
  
• Team Role Details
  
• Required Project Hours
  

DISCO Workbooks – Resources

• Organization Competence Summary
  
• Resource Competencies
  

PJI Utilization Reports

• Projects Resource Utilization and Availability
  
• Projects Utilization Summary
  
• Projects Utilization Trend
  
• Projects Actual Utilization
  
• Projects Scheduled Utilization
  
• Projects Expected Utilization
  
• Projects Actual Utilization Detail
  
• Projects Scheduled Utilization Detail
  
• Projects Expected Utilization Detail
  

PJI Projects Resource Availability Reports

• Projects Available Time Summary
  
• Projects Availability Trend
  
• Projects Current Available Resources
  
• Projects Available Resources Duration
  

Projects Available Resource Detail