Q&A with Acuity PPM on how companies can improve resource management
Resource management, and more specifically, resource capacity planning is a hot topic for organizations trying to maximize how much work they can get done. Especially in this current environment with a potentially smaller resource pool, allocating resources to the right projects is more important than ever.
Why is resource management hard? Spoiler – it’s about people, processes, and having the right tools.
SourceForge recently sat down with Tim Washington, President at Acuity PPM, a provider of lightweight project portfolio management software. Tim is one of the original Portfolio Management Professionals (PfMP) in the US and has over 15 years of experience in project portfolio management helping numerous Fortune 500 companies improve their portfolio management practices.
President at Acuity PPM
Straight to the point: what problems are companies facing related to resource management?
Companies run too many projects concurrently which causes project teams to be over-utilized. The domino effect is that companies cannot successfully deliver against their most important initiatives in a timely and consistent manner. Inherently, leadership understands that their people are constrained, yet because there are so many demands on the business, too many projects get approved and overwhelm project teams resulting in excessive multi-tasking and project delays.
What is the value of better resource management?
It’s all about strategy execution and delivery. Organizations that have better portfolio management practices in place (and specifically resource management in this case) perform better. But let’s dig deeper and define what our focus really is for doing resource management in the first place. Leadership should be focused on answering two key questions: 1) When can we take on new work? and 2) Can we get our existing work done? That’s the focus. If we can successfully answer both of those questions, leadership will improve project delivery.
Is collecting the right data one of the challenges?
Yes, absolutely. Resource management is already hard, try and keep it as simple as possible. We actually don’t need perfect data to answer these questions, we just need good enough data. It’s really a common pitfall for many organizations to think that they need really granular resource data. The fact is, very few leadership teams are decisive and nimble enough to truly use that extra level of data granularity; it’s a false precision.
How does this work in practice?
There are a number of moving parts to successful resource capacity management. It really starts with reasonable quality forecasts for how much time people will work on projects and operational work. At the project level, either a Project Manager, Resource Manager, or team member provides an estimate of the amount of time each person will work on the project based on its scope. At the portfolio level we need to aggregate all this data so that we can see what the total forecasted utilization really is for each team and individual over time. From here, organizations need someone to analyze the resource data and provide recommendations back to leadership. When and how this data is collected is an important part of the process. Finally, leadership must make tough decisions on what to approve and what to defer.
Can time tracking help?
In a very limited way. Time tracking is looking at the past, resource forecasts look at the future. Just as you cannot drive a car looking in the rearview mirror, you can’t manage capacity and forecasting by looking at historical data. Companies mistake time tracking and resource management all the time. Time tracking may be necessary for capturing actual costs and generating invoices, and it can be helpful for measuring the amount of non-project time (operational time) so that you know how much time can be blocked out for project work.
Why are spreadsheets a problem when it comes to resource management?
Anyone who has tried to collect all of this data across a moderate sized portfolio knows how challenging it is. Firstly, you have a large volume of data to collect and maintain. Then you have a number of people that need to enter the data, which can result in errors and mistakes being made in the spreadsheets. Next, it takes a lot of time to coordinate this effort with spreadsheets, and if there are any significant changes to the portfolio, it requires a lot of re-work to update all the spreadsheets. Finally, reporting against this data and doing scenario planning is time intensive. I don’t think leadership teams fully realize the lost productivity and hidden cost of doing resource planning and portfolio management in spreadsheets.
Can better prioritization help this problem?
Yes, better prioritization can help the problem of resource management, but only if it is communicated out to the teams. You see, even if a leadership team successfully prioritizes their projects, this is seldom communicated to the teams actually doing the work, and rarely enforced. The root cause is upstream related to the work intake process. The real problem is that leadership approves too much work. It’s hard to say no, I get it. New project requests get reviewed in isolation, look good, and get approved. But this is a result of having a singular project view, rather than a holistic portfolio view. Unfortunately, the best prioritization process cannot overcome an overloaded portfolio. Start saying no to more projects (or, “no, not right now”) and only approve projects when resources are available. Then you will see real results.
Tell me about Acuity PPM, what do you mean by a “lightweight portfolio management solution?”
Acuity PPM was designed as an easy-to-use project portfolio management solution. Our focus really is on the usability and interface. There have been a number of PPM solutions on the market, but the failure rate of those tools is quite high because they are just too complex. Some organizations only get as far as time tracking and never get to full portfolio management. Acuity PPM provides the critical capabilities for portfolio management packaged with an intuitive interface. I like to tell prospective customers that we’ve had executives set up their own instance of Acuity and start loading data within 1-2 hours. They like it. If executives can use Acuity, anyone can. User adoption is so important, and most organizations cannot afford the risk of a failed implementation of the ‘traditional’ PPM solutions.
That’s where Acuity PPM comes in?
Exactly. A lot of project organizations still utilize spreadsheets to track and manage their portfolio. Many of these organizations don’t have the budget or a need to buy the complex and expensive tools. This was one of the gaps in the market that we saw; Acuity PPM offers a solution that is easy to use and comes in at a manageable price point for small or medium-sized departments.
How can companies utilize Acuity PPM to replace spreadsheets?
Resource management and capacity planning is already hard, but utilizing spreadsheets makes it exponentially harder. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to create reasonable resource plans so that organizations can ultimately deliver more business value. The key is to make it easy to both create and maintain the resource data. We intentionally track resource data at a higher level, because as I mentioned earlier, the goal is good enough data to answer those two key questions. We incorporate work intake and prioritization into our approach while enabling users to conduct scenario planning; it works together very well.
Final words?
Any organization utilizing spreadsheets to track and manage their project portfolio should absolutely check out Acuity PPM.
About Acuity PPM
Founded in 2018, Acuity PPM provides Senior Leaders and Project Management Teams (PMO’s) with easy-to-use portfolio management software to manage the project portfolio. Acuity PPM provides a Work Intake module to support demand management and helps you create and evaluate new project requests through prioritization, financial planning and resource management (capacity planning). Project Managers can create status reports, track risks, issues, and benefits, and create milestone timelines.
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