Many organizations today do an excellent job at “project” planning but still have projects that come in behind schedule and over budget. The simple reason for many situations is that “resource management” is the critical problem, not necessarily detail “project management”. Handling such an environment requires BOTH a “top-down” and “bottoms-up” approach to resource management.
A great many projects start out with a spreadsheet based budget and high-level resource plan long before a task schedule is created in Microsoft Project. This “Top-down” resource plan is very often based on general skills (DBA, Tester, Programmer, etc.), and not specific named resources which later appear in the task schedule.
Leading industry analysts have identified one of the main reasons for projects not meeting their schedule is that early on in a project’s life cycle, some resources are committed to the project that are in fact over committed but the managers are not aware of it. Another issue documented by the analysts is that fact that when a project slips the project manager and the line managers whose staff is on the project, are not aware of the conflicts the slippage causes with other efforts.
This session will focus on how to successfully do both “Top-down” and “Bottoms-up” resource planning for the complete project lifecycle and techniques for getting early warnings of resource problems across the many projects in the organization is a timely manner, such that corrective action can be taken.
Specific Topics:
-“Best practices” for early stage resource planning
-Techniques to alert management of potential resource conflicts when projects slip
-Creating a resource “negotiation” process
-Identify efficient reporting techniques