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Resource Planning

HR Planning

The most important resource to a project is its people - the project team. Projects require specific expertise at specific moments in the schedule, depending on the milestones being delivered or the given phase of the project. An organization can host several strategic projects concurrently over the course of a budget year, which means that its employees can be working on more than one project at a time. Alternatively, an employee may be seconded away from his or her role within an organization to become part of a project team because of a particular expertise. Moreover, projects often require talent and resources that can only be acquired via contract work and third party vendors. Procuring and coordinating these human resources, in tandem with managing the time aspect of the project, is critical to overall success.


Managing the Team

In order to successfully meet the needs of a project, it is important to have a high-performing project team made up of individuals who are both technically skilled and motivated to contribute to the project's outcome. One of the many responsibilities of a project manager is to enhance the ability of each project team member to contribute to the project, while also fostering individual growth and accomplishment. At the same time, each individual must be encouraged to share ideas and work with others toward a common goal.

Through performance evaluation, the manager will get the information needed to ensure that the team has adequate knowledge, to establish a positive team environment and a healthy communication climate, to work properly, and to ensure accountability.

Managing the project team includes appraisal of employee performance and project performance. The performance reports provide the basis for managerial decisions on how to manage the project team.

Employee performance includes the employee's work results such as:

  • Quality and quantity of outputs
  • Work behavior (such as punctuality)
  • Job-related attributes (such as cooperation and initiative)

After conducting employee performance reviews, project managers should:

  • Provide feedback to employees about how well they have performed on established goals
  • Provide feedback to employees about areas in which they are weak or could do better
  • Take corrective action to address problems with employees performing at or below minimum expectations
  • Reward superior performers to encourage their continued excellence


Techniques for Managing Resources

One resource management technique is resource leveling. It aims at smoothing the stock of resources on hand, reducing both excess inventories and shortages.

The required data are the demands for various resources, forecast by time period into the future as far as is reasonable; the resources' configurations required in those demands; and the supply of the resources, again forecast by time period into the future as far as is reasonable.

The goal is to achieve 100% utilization. However that is very unlikely, when weighted by important metrics and subject to constraints; for example: meeting a minimum quality level, but otherwise minimizing cost.


Resource Leveling

Resource leveling is used to examine unbalanced use of resources (usually people or equipment) over time and for resolving over-allocations or conflicts.

When performing project planning activities, the manager will attempt to schedule certain tasks simultaneously. When more resources such as machines or people are needed than are available, or perhaps a specific person is needed in both tasks, the tasks will have to be rescheduled sequentially to manage the constraint. Resource leveling during project planning is the process of resolving these conflicts. It can also be used to balance the workload of primary resources over the course of the project, usually at the expense of one of the traditional triple constraints (time, cost, scope).

When using specially designed project software, leveling typically means resolving conflicts or over-allocations in the project plan by allowing the software to calculate delays and update tasks automatically. Project management software leveling requires delaying tasks until resources are available. In more complex environments, resources could be allocated across multiple, concurrent projects thus requiring the process of resource leveling to be performed at company level.

In either definition, leveling could result in a later project finish date if the tasks affected are in the critical path.