The Central Resource Management Metrics and Concepts
A question we frequently find at conferences is “How are other companies implementing resource management?” This is a broad question that we could not possibly cover in a single post, but we thought a helpful starting point would be to delve into the fundamental metrics, terms and considerations used in resource management. In the interest of working from the ground up, this will serve as useful reference material for when we move into deeper theory.
The Central Pillars of Resource Management
Resource Management boils down to two questions:
1) Who/What are the resources that will be used to complete the task?
2) When are they available?
As such, the following considerations are the central pillars of Resource Management, upon which all others rest:
Named Resources vs. Role – Following the Work Breakdown Structure, the manager outlines the skills that will be necessary to carry out the tasks within it, the roles are defined, and the Project Manager fits the resources to the roles based on the their skills and availability. This fulfills the who and what that will be used to complete the task.
% Allocation – This is an output of two other metrics. Divide demand (the amount one is being tasked to work) by capacity (the amount one is available to work), and you get the percentage a resource has been allocated. (demand) / (capacity) = %allocation. This answers the question of when the resources are available.
If you’d like to think of it this way, Resource Management is little more than a traditional inventory where you compare what is in stock with the orders that are made against it.
Degree of Rigor and Accuracy
As we covered in this blog post, there are varying degrees of rigor a company can apply to their management that result in correlating accuracies for the schedule. Though naming resources for a role and determining the % Allocation get to the heart of the Resource Management process, there are important considerations regarding how in-depth these measures need to be.
Let us say, for example, that a certain resource will be available 83% of a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) in a given quarter. A manager may assign them to 83% of a standard FTE’s demand each week. Then, the manager may find that resource will have 100% of an FTE each week of the quarter, except for a two week vacation, wherein they will obviously have 0% capacity. The manager’s schedule assigned the resource too lightly throughout much of the quarter, and now he or she is completely unavailable over the remaining two weeks.
The following considerations are aimed to match the level of rigor with the organization’s standard for accuracy, which may avoid this problem:
Project vs. Phase vs. Task-level detail – the level of granularity that will be used as the scale for estimating the demand. This is generally determined by some sort of standard that has been set forth by the organization. The project level is the broadest perspective to take, and the task level is the most rigorous with most credible outputs.
Time scale – whether you want your availability estimates to be down to the hour, day, month, quarter, year, et cetera. In the 83% FTE example, the time scale was quarterly, whereas the optimal results came at the weekly level. The Time Scale is often in sync with the overall level of granularity. For example, if you’re using task-level detail, then since tasks have a specific begin date and end date, you must necessarily be measuring down to an almost daily basis.
Just those four main concepts get you to the bare bones of Resource Management. In future posts, we will cover how to integrate these considerations into a process that works for your organization.
In the meantime, you can view our webinar on Business Intelligence to get more detailed theory on the process of Resource Management or refer to this post to get more on finding the appropriate level of detail for your organization.
Our white paper on addressing the challenges of PPM is available in full free-of-charge here.