Resource Planning, Prioritization, Demand, Visibility: Essential Guides for Today’s Savvy PMO

Resource planning, demand management, prioritization, and visibility: These are the four competencies to cultivate if your mandate is to drive business value.

Today’s savvy PMO integrates these four disciplines to help organizations focus on what matters and have the agility to shift quickly.

Today’s PMO supports multiple ways of working

The savvy PMO knows that the world of work is changing. Many enterprises are embracing a mix of work approaches to increase speed and the success rate of delivery.

Teams no longer use a single “one-size-fits-all” work delivery and execution process. PMOs must support all the different work methods that teams are using today, including collaborative, iterative, Agile, Lean, and traditional project work. Incorporating these methods into an integrated portfolio enables PMOs to empower teams to do their best work, ensure progress against plans, and shift priorities and resource capacity as needed.

In today’s changing world of work, mastering these four competencies gives savvy PMOs the insights needed to thrive.

• Resource planning and management
• Work intake and demand management
• Prioritization and alignment
• Visibility and reporting

These four competencies are interdependent, enabling PMOs to continually qualify demand, determine resource capacity, and prioritize the highest value initiatives. The right data and analyses both inform and are fed by these practices; savvy PMOs have insight into the state of the portfolio and its link to strategy at all times. As a result, they can be strategic advisors to the business, with the intelligence and reporting to guide executive decision-making.

Let’s explore each competency. We start with resource planning – a cornerstone of project portfolio management and a must for savvy PMOs – then building on each competency to see the progression of an adaptive PMO.

With effective resource planning, the savvy PMO makes the best use of the organization’s limited people resources. This adaptable, continuous process helps ensure that your resources are working on the highest value projects at all times.

Honing this competency, you can rebalance people and team assignments across prioritized work as needed.

Advancing your resource planning and management practice requires five steps:

1. Focus on your key resources first: Know your people, their skills, and status.
2. Designate and allocate resource roles and team assignments: Choose from among multiple approaches to best deliver work and outcomes.
3. Run basic analytics and account for financials: Verify that the work aligns with strategic objectives and adjust financials as needed.
4. Analyze capacity and demand: Determine what the organization can realistically achieve with current resources.
5. Rebalance, predict, and strategize for the future. Use scenario planning to compare alternatives and make more informed decisions.

Resource planning is the essential project portfolio management practice of optimizing resources to achieve the greatest organizational value. While resource management focuses on assigning tasks, roles, and responsibilities to project teams, resource planning is a more strategic endeavor. Resource planners take demand and capacity into account to ensure high-priority work can be accomplished.

Managing projects means managing resources, making it an essential part of PPM and the four competencies, and therefore critical to know details such as:

• What projects your people are currently working on
• What resources are available and when
• Skills and expertise of staff
• Existing and future resource gaps

When resource managers have the data that they need to plan and schedule, they can properly allocate people based on their skills and availability.

Effective resource planning enables companies to move their businesses forward with an optimized delivery of strategy. Not having the right people available to complete high-priority work is a common issue. Organizations that advance their resource planning capabilities often find they are more frequently delivering projects on time and on budget.

In addition, the ability to put the right resources on the right work at the right time fuels growth and innovation. Project and portfolio managers can better ensure that people and teams are aligned to strategy. They can adeptly rebalance resources to accommodate shifts in priorities and to exploit new opportunities.

Without insights into resources, such as current status and availability, organizations may greenlight every project. Saying yes to everything creates unrealistic expectations for executives, line-of-business managers, and even customers. The consequences are often overcommitted resources, project delays, poor productivity, increased costs, low morale, competitive setbacks, and many others.

Resource planning and capacity planning are complementary. Capacity planning is a higher-level activity, generally done by role and department, to determine utilization and if the organization has the resource capacity to meet current and future demands. A centralized work request system enables PMOs to collect and evaluate demand based on resource constraints.

With insight into resource capacity, PMOs can make the business case for more resources – or at least communicate why a project cannot be staffed. Executives and others can then make educated decisions about programs, applications, projects, and products. For example, they could hire new staff for an important initiative or put certain projects on hold to free up staff.

Using the right resource planning tools is a prerequisite. Project and resource managers often start with and continue to use spreadsheets to maintain resource schedules, plan assignments, track time, estimate costs, and assign tasks. This may work in smaller organizations, but larger, more complex organizations find it too cumbersome and slow to run resource management on multiple spreadsheets.

Resource management software can streamline the resource planning process. These solutions provide centralized visibility into essential data such as resource utilization, cost, capacity, throughput, location, and availability. Capabilities such as built-in Gantt charts often include the ability to create a simplified work breakdown structure (WBS) and other visualizations to identify resource needs.

Higher-level and more robust PPM solutions can go beyond project status reporting and provide a real-time view into the status of resources and activities tied to strategic objectives. Integrating work and resources in one place is a powerful capability for connecting planning with delivery. Functionality such as what-if scenario planning enables PMOs to understand the impact of potential changes before they occur, and plan resources based on available data.

In today’s evolving business environment, teams are changing from role-based, project-driven teams to cross-functional empowered teams with enhanced expertise that become highly efficient and contribute to larger programs and value streams. As organizations make shifts towards greater adaptability in the ways that they do business, PMOs can support these changes by empowering across all types of teams – such as project, Agile, or shared services – to deliver work and begin to manage their own capacity.

A formalized demand management function helps to inform your PMO’s resource planning. This enables you and your stakeholders to objectively qualify every work request, factoring resource constraints and schedules into the process. The goal is to approve and prioritize only the highest value work that the organization can realistically deliver.

These four steps help establish an efficient, consistent, and easily understood process for demand management and work intake:

1. Capture initial work requests:

Create a simple submission process for ideas and requests but also put enough rigor around it to prevent overload.

2. Direct the work intake process:

As requests come in, use gates as needed to organize the flow, collection, and evaluation of the right data at the right time..

3. Evaluate and generate key work items:

Enable gate approvers and stakeholders to score incoming work based on criteria such as strategic fit, risk mitigation, ROI, and more..

4. Audit, track, and improve:

Examine both the intake process and completed work to continually improve demand management and quickly advance the right strategic work..

Savvy PMOs often establish a prioritization process along with demand management and resource planning. The same scores applied during the evaluation phase can be used to prioritize the work. For each project, your prioritization process should enable the PMO and key stakeholders to answer this question:

Four steps enable you to prioritize the highest value work:

1. Prepare to prioritize: Determine your process, including who, what, when, how, and how often.
2. Choose your prioritization scoring method: Start with three common methods and analyze their pros and cons.
3. Optimize the process: Continuously act, evaluate, revise, and evolve to make the prioritization process as effective and valuable as possible.
4. Make the business case: Document and communicate how the prioritization process is helping the organization deliver on its strategic goals.

By improving your competencies in resource planning, demand management, prioritization and visibility, you are building the foundation for becoming a savvy PMO that can adapt and shift as change happens. You’ll elevate your position as a strategic guide for the business, fueling growth and innovation.

Read “Evolve into a Multi-Faceted Strategic Partner” to learn more.