We recently published an eBook that looked at some of the challenges faced by resource owners when working in projects today.
Building from that we wanted to understand how Clarity PPM helps project managers overcome those challenges and we reached out to our very own resource management expert, Dave Sprague. Dave is a product management professional with 20 years in diverse industry segments. He has been with Clarity PPM team for almost three years.
We started our discussion by asking Dave to complete the sentence Clarity PPM improves the capability of resource owners by…?
"Filtering available resources and investments down to the department or team level, allowing the resource manager to match supply and demand across the enterprise" said Dave. "Multi-value searches, like capacity based on role and geography, optimize an organization’s already stretched staff. Once the resource manager finds the right people, they can allocate specific percentages of their workload without having to use a full-time equivalent calculation."
This is not just a new way of looking at resource information, it’s a fundamentally different approach to the discipline of resource management – recognizing that availability is a complex discipline that is far trickier than simply asking, who has bandwidth?
Resource management should be more than resource allocation, yet for many organizations, and many tools, it’s simply an exercise in finding an approximately correctly skilled and available person to match the need. Elevating resource management to a more strategic discipline takes things to a much different level and Dave went on to explain just why this was so important to resource owners.
"From a resource perspective, resource managers gain visibility into all work for which their people are engaged within a familiar Excel paradigm. With telescoping, for example, resource managers are able to focus directly on identifying and solving problems. Simply select a time horizon to zoom into an area of focus or time horizon to spot staffing problem."
"Resource managers can focus even further on specific resources and view only ‘pinned’ resources to balance work between 2 or 3 people at a time in order to resolve bottlenecks. From a staffing perspective, resource managers can focus on people with the “My Team” view and easily address staffing requests."
This is clear recognition that resource management is a complex discipline, and it’s something that is becoming even more complex as organizations face increasing competition, ever greater customer expectations and ever shorter time horizons for projects.
It’s also a discipline that is dynamic as work executes and actual time and effort needs experience variances from what was planned – hence Clarity PPM’s focus on quickly identifying (and resolving) resource problems and bottlenecks.
Effective resource management can be the differentiator between success and failure, and Dave points out just how important effective resource management is to organizations.
"The system provides visibility into what the organization is working on and the amount of time they are spending. The system helps organizations validate their forecast for labor resources and milestones for delivery. It also provides resource managers and the portfolio management function the visibility organizations need today."
Want more? Download the eBook: Projects Fail Without Engaged Resource Managers