Efficient Resource Planning of Employees in Companies
August 26, 2024 | 7 min
Who does what and when? This core question, to which project management should provide an answer, includes the dimensions of time or deadlines (when), content (what) and people (who): Which people complete which tasks by which date. While the implementation of the content requirements is the responsibility of the respective employees from the specialist departments, project management is responsible for deadline management and, in some cases, resource planning. In the project environment, resources are generally understood to be the employees, as their availability is most often limited and they therefore represent the bottleneck resources in the project.
Definition of Resource Planning for Employees in Projects
Resource planning or resource management is a central component of project management and primarily involves the planning of people who are required and deployed to fulfill the tasks. As such, resource planning is always linked to the scheduling and cost planning of a project.
Why Resource Planning Is so Important
In most initiatives, project team members are the most important and scarcest resources. Efficient resource planning is therefore of great benefit to both the employees themselves and the organization. The prerequisite for this is that all capacity reductions – all activities from all future and current projects as well as from line activities and from vacations, further training or other absences – are considered.
- Protection against overloads
Comprehensive resource planning shows the current and future workload and available capacities of individual organizational units such as teams or departments. Overloads are already recognized during the planning phase and can thus be avoided. Depending on the planning granularity and maturity level of the organization, overloads also become visible at role and person level.
- More fairness through even load distribution
With role-based resource planning for employees, it is possible to consciously involve individual departments more in the project work or to keep them out. This is particularly useful for roles that are not based on department-specific expertise. For example, a person from the finance department who has project management expertise and experience could also lead an IT project. This would slightly reduce the burden on the IT department, as they wouldn’t need to provide a project manager. This approach contributes to a fairer distribution of workload.
- Realistic portfolio management
A company’s employees are often the limiting factor in how many initiatives can be implemented at all. Comprehensive portfolio management therefore always has an eye on the workload situation of departments and employees, especially key resources. A rough resource plan for employees should already be in place when applying for a project: this makes overloads visible and avoidable.
- Good make-or-buy decisions
Certain initiatives – such as the implementation of laws – cannot be postponed, even if they would lead to an overload situation. Instead, ongoing projects would have to be paused or interrupted. Thanks to effective resource planning, organizations can make data-based and reliable decisions on whether it is worthwhile to outsource sub-projects or entire projects to external service providers.
- Complete risk management
Being aware of impending overloads is part of comprehensive risk management. Delays in projects usually have a negative impact on subsequent or parallel initiatives if they make use of the same pool of resources.
- Strategic personnel planning
If initiatives planned for the medium or even long term, including resource planning, are also integrated into the project portfolio, future requirements for the necessary roles and qualifications of employees can be derived from this and enable the HR department to develop further training measures at an early stage and hire the appropriate employees.
Resource Management Tasks
Efficient resource planning of employees is of great importance for the project work itself and for strategic personnel planning. In the following, the focus is on the resource planning of employees in projects. Strategic personnel planning in the context of portfolios and short-term task planning or self-planning by employees will be the subject of other articles in this blog.
Efficient resource planning solves the following tasks, among others:
- Determination of demand:
How many resources are needed for which activities and how long do they need for them?
- Risk management:
Sensible resource planning should prevent overloads in advance and distribute workloads as evenly as possible. By continuously monitoring the project and the use of resources, potential overloads quickly become visible and can thus be resolved proactively.
- Resource shortages and conflicts:
Holistic resource management, in which all employees are recorded with all their activities and capacity reductions, ensures that important resources are not scheduled more than once and that projects therefore compete for these key resources.
How does a project secure the necessary project team members? This question cannot be answered universally, as the approach depends on the maturity level of the company’s project and resource management. Since there is no universally applicable standard process in resource management, the approach varies significantly from one company to another.
Resource Manager or PMO Under Obligation
In larger organizations, there is often the role of the resource manager. This role is responsible for ensuring that projects are “staffed” with the right employees (resources). The resource manager often also decides whether external personnel can be deployed if not enough or not the right, professionally qualified internal employees are available.
Other organizations have placed resource planning under the responsibility of the Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO can usually decide whether external project staff can be brought in if resources are scarce. In addition, the PMO is often responsible for managing programs and project portfolios. For example, it can pause low-priority projects in order to free up resources for more important initiatives.
It is also not uncommon to find large coordination rounds and workshops in which the respective project management requests suitable employees for the project from the individual departments. This can lead to tough discussions about whether these resources are even available to the required extent at the requested time and can be assigned to projects. Such coordination meetings for the resource planning of employees tie up numerous managers, are not always crowned with success and are therefore probably the worst of the solutions presented.
3 Key Success Factors for Efficient Resource Planning
The larger a company becomes, the more varied the maturity levels across its organizational units. There is no universally valid standard procedure for resource allocation; instead, each unit has its own approach to assigning the right people to projects. Sometimes the task is delegated to the role of a resource manager, other times the PMO takes care of assigning project staff. It is also not uncommon for each department to work independently, relying on elaborate and laboriously updated Excel spreadsheets.
Despite these significant challenges, there are three factors crucial to successful resource management:
1. Central resource pool
Projects are increasingly crossing departmental, divisional and company boundaries. It is therefore no longer practicable for each unit to work with its own solution. The availability of all departments and all employees must be managed centrally, in a single source of truth. Individual departmental planning in Excel & Co. sabotages comprehensive, efficient resource management.
2. Holistic capacity view
For effective resource planning, the view of each employee’s workload must be as complete as possible. This includes not only project work but also the time they need to dedicate to departmental tasks, vacations, training, and other activities. Considering all capacity reductions can be done at the individual employee level or at the departmental level, depending on the desired granularity of the resource planning. Without a realistic, holistic workload analysis, resource planning is likely to fail.
3. Adaptation to the different requirements
Resource planning must not only fit the company, but also the respective divisions and departments. If a standard is specified for everyone despite different levels of maturity, this will very likely be undermined and isolated solutions such as Excel will be used again. The result: no central resource pool, no holistic capacity view, no meaningful resource planning.
Resource planning should be designed centrally, holistically and yet adapted to specific requirements as far as possible. This is actually the biggest challenge that a company has to master. And this applies not only to resource management in particular, but to project management in general.
How Can Software Support Employee Resource Planning?
As already mentioned, project and resource planning go hand in hand. It therefore makes sense that resource management cannot take place separately from project planning. The software for project and resource management must support the 3 key success factors mentioned earlier:
Central resource pool
A single source of truth is the basis for functioning resource management. A central database must be established to enable reliable resource planning. These requirements ultimately preclude an organization from working with many different project and resource planning tools or even Excel, all of which operate with their own database. Enterprise software, on the other hand, generally provides the required central database.
Holistic capacity view
Project and resource management software must be able to reflect reality. Among other things, this consists of different working time models, includes different capacity reductions such as vacations and training and, of course, includes both project work and time for line activities. This can either be implemented in great detail by considering all capacity reductions individually. Or the availability for project work of the organizational unit is calculated and stored as a lump sum. Companies should not fall into the accuracy trap here: Meticulously planning and tracking every activity in order to obtain an hourly availability is not necessary in the vast majority of cases, is time-consuming, makes planning prone to errors and brings little benefit.
Specific customizations
This is where the vast majority of project and resource management software providers stumble: the solution should fulfill as many different requirements as possible and still enable holistic capacity planning with a central database. This means that the solution must map different project planning methods – agile, hybrid, classic – and also fulfill department-specific requirements for both project planning and resource management. A PPM platform that offers ready-made solution modules that can be variably designed and combined is ideal. This platform must also allow the company to design its own solutions. It is important that all data is brought together centrally in one place, where it can be analyzed and condensed into valuable information.
Why is this point so important? The users ultimately determine the success or failure of an introduced solution: if the software does not provide any benefit for the individual user or is complicated to use, then it will not be used. And the software can only unfold its benefits when it is used. User acceptance is therefore of central importance. Software that only offers a single standard will not be able to satisfy all employees. Companies should therefore pay attention to “flexibility by design”: The software should offer individualization options as standard functionality.
Summary
Efficient resource planning by a company’s employees is a core element of project management and the basis for successful projects. Conversely, poor resource management is one of the most common reasons why projects run out of time and budget or even fail. Three key success factors for good resource planning can be derived from practical experience: Working with a central resource pool, a complete capacity view and the ability to individualize procedures and software solutions. Ultimately, it is the employees who determine the success of projects: In terms of content, their technical expertise that flows into the projects and also the use of a software solution that is profitable for them and for the company.
About the Author
Felix Bernhardt, Product Manager Resource Management, cplace
Felix Bernhardt has been working for cplace in various positions for more than 6 years. Initially, he worked as a consultant supporting customers in the implementation, rollout and further development of their project and resource management. He now contributes his extensive experience and knowledge in this area as product manager for the new resource management of cplace. His focus is on a solution-oriented approach that takes into account different methods and levels of maturity in the planning and management of human resources.
Go to LinkedIn Profile
