Resource planning. Parts 2 and 3. What depends on the resource plan. What determines the resource plan

In the continuation of the first introductory part, we consider two important topics at once. On the one hand, these topics have more relevance to the management of the program of projects or the company as a whole than to the management of a single project. On the other hand, the understanding by a specific project manager of the role of resource planning in the company's key processes greatly facilitates his communication with management and makes inappropriate discussions about the need for resource planning and the quality of resource plans.

What depends on the resource plan?

Yes, resource planning is not the most creative task and the actualization of the resource plan is perceived by many as an inevitable evil. But let's see why we have to spend so much time coloring plates in Excel, transferring and checking current hours from timesheets to the resource plan and planning hours for the remainder of the project, taking into account the staff shortage, force majeure at the client and the new, agreed scop.

1. The correctness of the calculation of project marginality and financial plan. In each company plan finances. The revenue side of the company is the profit of the projects. If the projects will be less profitable than predicted when it starts, the company will not receive the money it was counting on. Well, if we are talking only about a slight change in the bonus fund or shareholder income. And if the company lives on borrowed money? Then the company will be forced to overpay even more for bank interest and reduce its profits. And even if the resource plan is made, on the contrary, with a margin and in fact the project cost per month less than planned - this is also bad. Especially if the company lives on all the same borrowed money and is forced to pay the cost of money that will not be claimed.
2. Timeliness of closing open positions in the project team. This is the most obvious consequence of correct and not very correct planning. Everything is simple here - I made a realistic resource plan in advance - it gave the resource managers and HR the opportunity to prepare well for their project and select the right specialists. But if the plan is unrealistic, changes are constantly being made to it, or it is born at all before the very start of the project, then there is almost no chance of getting a fully equipped team in a timely manner. And if the project is important and priority, then such plans are also very expensive for the company - we can’t recruit the right people in time, we start with a team that is not started, the dates start to go, people are constantly overtime and we immediately burden the project with unnecessary risks.
3. Download HR service. What gets a job HR? Rather, not so. What should get to work HR? In the right companies, HR gets to work the result of the analysis of the consolidated resource plans by resource managers in the form of a plan of unmet need for various specialists. You can, of course, be guided by the director's scent or the opinion of some resource managers, but analyzing and optimizing resource plans is the easiest and most understandable way. With this approach, HR understands what it is working on, seeing a summary image for all projects, and resource managers see the resource risks of projects and have the opportunity to prepare alternative options in case HR does not have time. And how will he keep up if vacancies are generated in the “urgent”, “tomorrow”, “escalation”, etc. mode? Of course, nothing. Correct and timely resource plans will save everyone.
4. Loading AXO. In order for new employees to receive equipment in a timely manner, jobs were prepared for them, the AXO department must see the recruitment plan in detail. In detail, because the requirements for the workplace of a designer and developer are usually different. And the recruitment plan is the first derivative of the consolidated resource plan. In general, at this point, instead of the AXO, you could put any service unit - finance, accounting, transportation department, etc.
5. The size and comfort of the office. If a company is experiencing an active period in its life and is either actively growing or optimizing, resource planning becomes especially important. And the risks here are quite tangible. The company either has to change its office frequently, or overpay for unused areas.
6. The optimal use of resources. We will come back to this point when we consider the resource planning of a single project. But if you briefly touch on this point, then you can get the same result in different ways. You can draw such a resource plan that some employees will be underutilized (we pay for idle hours), and some are overloaded (we pay for processing at a double rate). In order to avoid such situations, resource plans are optimized both at the level of a specific project manager, and at the level of program managers and resource managers.
7. The performance of the company as a whole. The conclusion that suggests itself - a company where well-planned resource planning, with a high degree of probability is an effective company. And vice versa - if resource planning is lame, the company constantly experiences a shortage, then an excess of resources and the cost of man-hours, compared with the first type of company, all other things being equal, is much higher. And that means lower profits, which could be directed to the development of the company with all the consequences.

Not bad, huh? It turns out that the resource plan affects almost everything in an IT company, and how it affects!

Now consider the inverse problem and try to figure out what the resource plan depends on and its quality?

What does the resource plan depend on?

Let's think about what we should be introductory in order for us to make at least the first version of the resource plan. The main introductory, obviously, is an assessment (in the form of work breakdown structure) of labor intensity, timing, complexity and coherence of work, budget and delivery methodology. Everything else, as a rule, can be taken into account in the form of amendments to the resource plan. So let's look at how each of these and some other points affects the resource plan.

1. The correctness of the initial assessment of the main scopa. We will discuss this topic in more detail later, but let's think about it now, and on the basis of what do we make resource plans at all? Probably, if it’s very rough, there will be something like “we take the laboriousness of the project, we take the duration of the project, we group the works by types of performers and calculate the required number of performers of each type and the terms of employment on the project”. In real life, everything is much more complicated, but what remains the same is the direct dependence of the quality of the resource plan on the quality of the assessment of labor intensity. Yes, you can make a bad resource plan on the basis of a good assessment, but no one can do a good resource plan if an incorrect assessment of labor input is received at the entrance. Errors in the assessment of the complexity of the project, as a rule, result either in significant processing or in disruption of terms. Neither one nor the other is what pleases the project manager and shareholders of the company.
2. The correctness and realistic timing of the project. Often it happens that the customer puts a very strict deadlines for the execution of works. As a rule, to hedge up and have plenty of time in case something goes wrong. In general, the rule works: “shortening of time can be compensated by additional performers”. However, this rule works in a very small range of terms and under a number of conditions. And from a certain moment everyone starts to remember about nine women and the probabilities of having a child in one month. On this topic, you can argue for a long time, but for now it can be stated that reducing the project timeframe (at a given complexity) leads not only to an increase in the number of performers, but also to an increase in overhead costs (at least we are talking about additional timblids and complicating the management system) project. Which, of course, should be reflected in the resource plan.
3. Delivery methodology. Everything is simple - whether we work on one of the flexible methodologies, classical or iterative waterfalls, each methodology requires a certain structure and logic of project management, which is expressed in different volume of management overheads, team structure and configuration of the resource plan.
4. The complexity and coherence of work. In fact, in most cases it is impossible to make a quality resource plan without first analyzing the structure of the work and identifying the dependencies between the components of the project. A graphic and typical illustration of this statement are the projects of transformation of existing information systems. As part of such projects there is almost always such a wonderful thing as the migration of data from legacy systems to a new one. Especially if there is a multistep migration with numerous intermediate steps in enriching and improving data quality. The presence of such beauty imposes strict requirements on the order, timing of implementation and implementation of related system components. And in this case, resource planning should already be carried out with a clear understanding of the identified interdependencies.
5. Budget. Leave the development within the company, outsource or make a combined team. Can you afford to buy high-end professionals or work with those who are. The first will do the specified amount of work much faster and with better quality - respectively, will spend less hours. However, if our planning horizon exceeds the timeframe of a single project and our task is to grow our pool of professional developers, then even if the budgets allow, it makes a lot of sense to pair with the seigneur developers of beginners. Yes, in order for them to get the necessary experience on real projects by increasing the cost of a particular project. However, often, this is the only way to develop real professionals from the beginner specialists. In any case, the size of the budget is one of the determining factors when choosing a team and resource planning.
6. The presence of the contract warranty. Many people forget about this stage of work. Often, resource planning ends with the stage of putting the system into operation. And the fact that then it must be serviced for another year under warranty - this is not in the resource plan, nor in the calculation of the project’s economy. In fact, this approach is legitimate only if we expect to conclude a separate contract for technical support. In any other case, the lack of resources provided for the implementation of warranty support will be a mistake that will complicate the life of resource managers, make the financial forecast wrong and distort the economic parameters of the project.
7. Universality of team members. Very important aspect. If you dream up and imagine that the project is staffed by universal fighters, each of whom is able to both design the architecture of new components and evaluate the laboriousness of the development and lead the development both at the front level and at the level of application servers and databases, and write test cases and test do it and write release notes and all this with high quality and good speed, it will be just a dream team. And the resource plan for such a team will look very simple - we take the number of hours and evenly distribute them among all team members. In reality, we have to take into account the restrictions that impose specific skillsets of the project team members on resource planning.
8. Quality and change management approach. This is a separate and very big topic. It is good if you live within one of the flexible methodologies that are known to welcome change. But if you live in a waterfall, or just pretend to live in ejail, change management is one of the key skills of a project manager. Or a change manager, if we are talking about a program or a large project. At the stage of resource planning, it is very important to understand the extent of changes to reserve resources in advance, what resources to reserve, what period these resources will be used for, etc.
9. Team Distribution As a rule, the performance of a team that is in the same location (or better in the same room) will significantly exceed the performance of the same team, but whose members are distributed in several locations. It seems that people are the same and we spend about the same on salaries, but the team’s productivity is much lower. When resource planning is very important to understand which team will do the project, how it is distributed and whether it is possible to collect it in one place at a critical time for the project.
10. The possibility of sharing resources. If we are not talking about an isolated project, but, say, about a program where you can fumble resources with colleagues from neighboring projects, then resource planning conditions become much more comfortable - you have the opportunity to plan ½, ⅓, ¼ FTE (full time employee), since the rest of the time will be involved in other projects (in fact, this is already a separate task for resource managers, but it is completely solvable). There is no such luxury on an isolated project - we cannot recruit ⅓ a developer or a tester. But most often this situation develops with project managers. Uneven load in the course of the project leads to a non-optimal use of the management resource.
11. Holidays. In the first version of the resource plan, when there is a rough assessment of the need for personnel, it is quite permissible not to bother with regard to vacations. But when it comes to the resource plan, as a tool for daily project management, then it becomes very dangerous not to take into account non-working days. There are 52 weeks in a year and at least 2 of them each team member will spend on vacation. If we are talking about a team of just 10 people, this means that you immediately lay down about 2 x 5 x 10 = 100 man-days of deficit. Which will be covered, for example, overtime.
12. Holidays. One and a half weeks of New Year's holidays, May holidays, February 23, March 8, and others like them take from 2-3 weeks a year another 2-3. And if we talk about distributed teams, where people from different countries work, then everything becomes even more trivial. Each country has its own national holidays and the project manager will just have to study the culture of the countries where the members of his team work to create an accurate resource plan taking into account the holidays. And if not, you can go back to the previous point and double the deliberately put in shortage of labor hours and difficulties in the project.

This list can certainly be extended further, but we highlighted the main topics. It turns out that the quality of resource planning affects almost everything in an IT company, and the quality of the resource plan itself is influenced by quite a few factors, for the proper accounting of which certain skill is needed.

In the next part, we will move on to more practical things and consider the topic of resource planning in an isolated project.