Implementing Intelligent Resource Management into Your Organization

In my practice, I often get asked how we know that a company can deliver more projects. My answer is easy as pie: your people are capable of doing more upon intelligent management.

When I say that your project teams can be more efficient and deliver better results, I don’t mean assigning them to extra tasks and overloading them with work. I’m talking about intelligent resource and task management with the primary goal of balancing resource workload. We should make sure everyone is engaged, but not overloaded, and ready to help other departments if needed.?

In a multi-project environment with a shared resource pool, idleness (if it’s not a result of a bottleneck) is less harmful than overload, and here’s why. An overloaded resource is a bottleneck that has a snowballing effect: when the first bottleneck occurs, very soon it’ll be multiplied because, at first, other resource groups will be idle waiting for the overwhelmed coworkers to deliver their work, and then they will become overloaded, too, because of an enormously increased volume of new tasks. And this chain is endless. This will definitely result in missed due dates and cost overruns.?

I know from my 25+ years of experience that most companies struggle to deliver the desired number of projects because of bad resource management. They hire additional resources, their costs grow, and as a result, they fail anyway. So, I’m 90% confident that your company also can deliver more with your available resources. The key is analyzing your resource performance and switching to another resource management approach.?

Another related question people often ask me as a co-founder of Epicflow is how exactly our product can help you have your resources deliver more.?

There are two essential things I’d like to mention here: our approach to multi-project management and the functionality of Epicflow that is intended to let businesses grow taking into account the existing constraints.?

We treat any company that runs multiple projects with a shared resource pool as a complex environment with a strong resource dependency. The goal we aim to achieve with our approach to multi-project management is preventing overload and ensuring a smooth workflow across all projects in the Pipeline. We’re delivering this objective with the following three principles:?

• Clear priorities?
• Smart buffer time management?
• Switching from the project level to the resource level.?

We’ve built our product on these principles, and it helps businesses deliver more projects without extra costs and without overloading their available resources thanks to

• Automatic task and project prioritization with a real-time update capability;
• Real-time resource performance, project progress, and time and budget buffer monitoring;
• Semi-automatic resource allocation based on competencies and attributes, that helps assign the right task to the right resource at the right time;
• AI-driven predictions: predictive analytics mechanisms calculate resource demand taking into account dynamics of the multi-project environment in relation to available resource capacity, and come up with the predictions of whether project goals are feasible or not. If not, users get suggestions for improving the state of things: either by moving milestones, reassigning resources, or enabling project staggering (moving the start dates of some projects).?

I’d like to mention project portfolio management in this article, because a project portfolio manager deals with resource management challenges most of the time, and we at Epicflow know how to help address them.?

Managing a portfolio is most times selecting and prioritising the projects you want to deliver from a business perspective. Every portfolio is constrained by various types of resources: money, equipment, facilities, and of course the most important ones – humans.?

I consider two main phases:

• planning the portfolio?
• execution.?

Planning is the easy part (sorry, it’s just my view) but the execution phase is full of challenges. These are common and unknown uncertainties. When dealing with the dynamics in the portfolio, one has to decide how to distribute the shared resources. To save one project, some resources have to switch from one project to another. This can or will harm some of the other projects.?

Project managers cannot deal with this. For them, it is always a question of where to get the resources from. There is only one person who can decide, and this is the portfolio manager. They can decide which project to save or protect against other projects that have to be rescheduled. That’s why I claim that the portfolio manager is also the resource manager.

To support the portfolio manager in the execution phase in dealing with uncertainty and managing risks, the Epicflow team has developed several AI-driven features:

1. Monitoring the feasibility of the resource groups. Are they delivering what is demanded? Is there someone overloaded? I call this the Earned Value of the Resource groups. It predicts delays in the future on the project level.?
2. Monitoring the consumption of the different buffers: time buffers, capacity buffers, and risk buffers.
3. Predicting the delivery dates of the portfolio based on project plans and known uncertainties from the past.

Therefore, instead of overloading your resources with extra assignments or hiring extra people to be able to deliver the required (desired) scope of work, turn your focus from projects to resources and check out how a resource management (not a PM) solution can help you with that.?