How do you really know how busy someone is?
A recurring discussion with CPS’ customers is about managing their portfolios of projects and resource management. They often struggle to balance the desire to complete projects, with the availability of resources while looking to justify the need for a required headcount.
Project Online can help facilitate resource requests by allowing projects to be accurately planned and resourced from a controlled set of resources in a resource pool. If the stars align, the organisation has mature project planning, a resource assignment process, and the people to make it happen so a good level of success will be achieved.
A resource plan will only be useful if it contains all activities for all people, which is often a massive challenge. Customers sometimes use “ghost schedules” to show a resource’s non-project time, and this becomes another management overhead and it’s not always scalable across an entire organisation.
Without a way to see the wider picture of assigned work, other problems appear. For example, when a project implements changes that affect resources working 100% on other work, this leads to implementation issues and then change overload and/or fatigue.
Understanding the bigger picture
In the Modern Work Management sphere, it’s important to focus on the bigger organisational picture and look at work more generally, rather than just individual project tasks. This brings a great challenge of the utilisation currency; how can we see how busy Matt from HR is when he has only one project task assigned with many other tasks being tracked in other tools, such as Microsoft Planner?
To enable a full picture, organisations must work more broadly with managers of all levels to assist staff with the myriad of tasks (things!) that they are expected to complete.
IT/tech departments need to deliver solutions that pull activity in from multiple tools in order to facilitate a conversation, as no algorithm will provide the correct answer as to whether a resource really has time for your work.
CPS – Microsoft Partner of the Year 2018 (Project & Portfolio Management) and edison365 – can help you maximise your Microsoft 365 subscription by deploying solutions that enable you to track activity across your whole organisation and the variety of work management tools, including Project Online, Project for the web, Planner and Azure DevOps, alongside other non-Microsoft solutions.
Author
An experienced PPM Consultant, Matt has a history of successful PPM consultancy and implementation. His wider professional qualifications and experience in HR, finance, and business administration-management allow him to bring a unique perspective to clients.
