Resource planning. Part 1. What is it all about?

What is the most valuable for an IT company? What is the main asset and resource for almost every IT company? What does the company spend the most money on? Which cost item is the biggest? What resource do you spend the most money on? I will not be much mistaken if I say that the answer to all these questions is the “Team of the company”. It is your team that makes projects, moves your company forward and earns money, and it is precisely salaries, bonuses, taxes, equipment, jobs and other direct and indirect payments to your team that account for the bulk of the company's costs.

If at the right time you have an insufficient amount of your key resource, you will not be able to make an important project and miss the benefits. And if you have an excess of resources, you will incur losses by paying for the idle part of your team. Let's talk about resource planning.

The theme of resource planning is surprisingly poorly presented both in specialized literature and in Runet spaces. It is assumed that project managers and companies themselves know what it is and how to work with it. As experience shows, this is a bit wrong. Of course, everyone understands that paying a salary to an employee who does nothing is bad. It is also bad when you lack the necessary resources. But this understanding is not always enough to establish effective resource planning in the company. And what to do? I will try to share my understanding of the issue.

I plan to state my understanding something like this:

1. What is a resource plan? Here we draw a picture, give some definitions and tell you how people differ from money.
2. What does the resource plan affect? Consider the scope of IT companies, which, it turns out, are directly dependent on the quality of resource planning. And if your resource planning is not carried out at the proper level, or suddenly you don’t have it at all, then maybe after reading this part you will have legitimate questions.
3. What influences the resource plan? We consider the inverse problem - what determines the resource plan, what is at the entrance and determines the shape, size and specificity of the resource plan
4. Resource planning within an isolated project. This is resource planning from the point of view of a specific project manager, who has an understanding of the task, a budget and needs to form a team and implement a project. Also, there is a checklist here, running on which it will be possible to understand, and did we include all the necessary things in the resource plan?
5. Resource planning for a project portfolio or program. And this is resource planning from the point of view of a program director, a project portfolio manager, a resource manager, or a company manager, where many projects take place at the same time, all of them are at different phases and in all of them, and resources are needed and released.
6. Long-term resource planning. If we reach this point, then we will consider the task of managing the company's resource pools in the long term.

What is a resource plan?

For starters give an example of a resource plan

By example, we see a resource plan for a conditional project, along with financial information and some analytics. Depending on the level of access of the project manager and the specifics of internal processes, the resource plan may vary widely. In particular, removing salaries and hourly rates can only be limited to planning man-hours.

If you try to googling on the resource management / resource planning tool, then you will get a rather impressive list of paid (mostly) and free tools that to some extent help in solving the problem of resource management. Well, we will use the good old MS Excel.

Now let's agree on the terms:

• Resource - a specialist with the necessary specialization and experience. Moreover, by experience is meant not only the cumulative number of years that a person has already managed to devote to his profession, but also experience in working with specific projects. This is a key point and we will come back to it.
  
  
• Internal resource pool - a department or division that has the necessary resources that can be used on the project. Examples: FrontEnd department / department, QA department / department, project management department / department, etc. Compared with external resource pools, the advantages of internal - effective communication, guaranteed qualifications, good manageability. Cons - poorly scaled.
  ')
  
• External resource pool - a company or specialists external to the company that implements the project, who have the necessary resources and are ready to give them to the project for temporary use. Examples: freelance sites, companies that specialize in outsourcing, partner companies with temporarily underutilized resources. Pluses in comparison with internal resource pools: perfectly scaled. Disadvantages: complexity of communications, expensive management, unwarranted quality of resources, cost, administrative overhead.
  
  
• An uncoordinated (unprotected) resource plan is a request for resources to complete a project. Such a resource plan tells you what resources, when, in what quantity and for what period you need in order for you to successfully complete your project. At the same time, instead of the names and surnames in this plan are dashes or spaces - there are no real people yet, you just want to get them. For now, you can only determine the requirements for the specialists you need and, perhaps, formulate suggestions for resource managers regarding the specific candidates you would like to see on your project. Certain positions, of course, may already be “stalemate” - specific names of people in respect of whom you already have confirmation of their participation in your project are spelled out.
  
  
• The coordinated (zastaflenny) resource plan is a contract for the supply of resources of the required quality for a specific time with the owners of the resource pools. The difference from the previous version - all dashes are replaced with real names and surnames.
  
  
• Stuffing is the process of recruiting and coordinating resources for non-enlarged positions of the resource plan. Simply put, staffing is the selection of a team for a project. It is important to note here that it is very rare that a project manager receives on his project employees who fully meet the stated requirements. Everyone wants a project team, 100% consisting of designer designers, developers, analysts and testers, but not all receive such teams. It is also not always possible to get people by the right time or at the right time. In this, the plan can be modified as staging. If the quality of resources is worse than that which was laid in the evaluation of the project, then, obviously, the number of hours to perform the same work increases. If the necessary resource is released from another project earlier or later than you planned, then you fix this fact and rework the plan taking into account the new conditions.

So how are people different from money?

For a better understanding of the essence of resource management, let us draw an analogy with financial management:

The analogy is not limited to these cases. The general pattern noted is that in almost every case of resource management, an analogy can be found from financial management and vice versa. However, there is a very significant difference between money and resources, which determines the specifics of this subject area.

In the world of money, if you borrow 100,000 rubles in a bank, you can immediately start spending, investing, etc. - money will immediately begin to work, they do not need to be taught. In the world of resource management, if you borrow two developers, they usually cannot immediately begin to bring benefits to your project. Because, unlike money, the value of a resource is determined not only by its qualifications and level of ownership of one or another tool, but also by knowing the specifics of your particular project. And this knowledge can be acquired only while inside your project, spending some time studying it.

It is on this topic that disputes often arise with the customer, who needs to implement this or that unscheduled function as soon as possible. Typically, the rhetoric of the customer is approximately the following: “Twenty / hundreds / thousands of people work in your company, add another Y to the project and do what we want”. True customer is that, yes, in your company, as a rule, there are really quite a lot of qualified people who could do what he wants. But he does not take into account the fact that in order to start implementing these requirements, qualified specialists from other projects need to acquire the necessary knowledge about your project, and this takes time, which you do not have.

Hence the conclusion - when managing resources, it is always necessary to remember that a newly added resource, no matter how qualified it is, will require a certain amount of time to dive into the project and only then will it begin to produce results. The time it takes to dive depends on the qualification of the resource, the degree of its familiarity with the subject area and the project, the information infrastructure of the project and the presence of people nearby who can tell in a simple way about the project and show how it works.

On this with the first part of the finish. In the next part we will talk about what affects the resource plan and the quality of resource planning.