Thursday, December 16, 2010

Resource Management Maturity

Linda, the operations director, was again reviewing reports with her development manager Dennis.  “I don’t understand why we continue to have this rolling bubble of demand in the next two weeks, then it drops off to nothing after a month?”  The report Linda was reviewing was the resource demand report.  “Every time we run this, no matter how much effort we’ve put into planning our resource needs, the report always shows we need 200% or 300% of our capacity for just the next couple of weeks, but then it rapidly drops off.  But when we actually perform the work, we have adequate resources, but then the bubble shifts out in front of us again.  What is going on, Dennis?”
Planning and scheduling for resource demand is always challenging.  Just a few years ago, there were shops operating with excess headcount.  Tales from those days might be mythic lore to today’s project teams.  Some organizations are running well below necessary headcount.  Getting projects completed while keeping up with support and maintenance demands requires constant rejuggling of priorities and resource assignments.  People multitask.  Team members are whipsawed from one must-do yesterday to another gotta-have-it-now today.  They are heroes in their organizations, but this is nonetheless poor management and inefficient use of people (though, having been there, it still sometimes beats the alternative).
Interestingly, we can use these examples as heuristics to suggest the organization’s maturity level.  For example, the organization that is scrambling, doesn’t know who is doing what, and is constantly changing assignments and priorities is clearly a Maturity Level 1 organization.  A Maturity Level 2 shop is managing the portfolio of projects, initiates projects based on priority, has basic metrics (task estimates and resource usage), and generally has people assigned when and where they need to be (projects advance based on real-time availability), but limited predictive capability for planning what projects can be delivered based on resource capacity.
A Maturity Level 3 organization has reliable task effort estimates, team members report progress by updating their hours by task and re-estimate the remaining hours, resource schedules are based on productive effort, all resource hours are tracked (project, support, maintenance, admin, vacation, training, etc.), availability is projected based on historical trends, statistical allocations, and planned absences, so that theoretically management can predict which projects can be staffed.  The reality, though, is the situation Linda and Dennis find themselves in.  All the numbers are there, but there is still a fog of misinformation that separates ideality from reality.
Future posts will describe Maturity Level 4 and Maturity Level 5 organizations and address why Linda and Dennis are operating in a fog and what they can do to find the sunlight.
In the meantime, which example best describes your organization?  Do you see value in raising your organizational maturity?

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