More thoughts about planning the resource required for multiple projects
Chris Croft
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Chris Croft
★ Writer and Keynote Speaker, Project Management and Time Management, Negotiation Skills ~ UK-based. Top 10 video trainer in the world - LinkedIn Learning and Udemy.
- Although shapes are good I think in reality it would probably be a spreadsheet with rows of numbers on
- You would probably use Excel
- There are two ways to construct it: there is the 'proper way', which is to get the numbers from a Gantt chart for each project, or the 'real way' which is to guess (or “estimate”) the number of people and duration for each project - still much better than nothing!
- You could do it for all the projects in the company, or just for your projects in your area, or for the bottleneck resource - for example IT - to see whether it is possible to do all the projects that the company wants
- You want to have a Gantt of Gants because then you know you are okay, you know what you can and cannot promise to your customers, and also you can use it to lobby for more resources if you need them
- Your boss wants a Gantt of Gants because then they can check on you
- A Gantt of Gantts allows you to check on a whole department in only one minute per month, and it allows you to look at the past: have they done what they should've done, and the future: can they do what you want them to do, and are you going to get things in the right order?
- If the future is looking impossible (not enough resources) then your two options are a) to get more resources or b) to move the project either forward into a space, if there is one, or backwards out into the future to a point where you have some available resource
- When new projects arrive you can use the Gantt of Gantts to decide which existing project will have to be slipped
- The Gantt of Gantts allows the top team to discuss priorities - we can’t have everything we want this year, so shall we have the HR project or the Marketing project? Without it you’ll have a strategic plan which is really just an unresourced wish list…..
onwards and upwards!
Chris
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