8. Optimizing Resource Utilization

 

In the previous wedding case study, it is clear that Steve and Susan have resource problems. Getting a handle on all of the tasks that have to be done is a great start, but it’s not enough to know the tasks and the order they come in. Before you can put the final schedule together, you need to know who is going to do each job, and the things they need so they can do it.

“We’ve got so much to do! Invitations, catering, music… and I’ve got no idea who’s going to do it all. I’m totally overwhelmed.” From this statement it is clear that Susan is worried about human resources. In comparison, Steve realizes that not all resources are people: “And it’s not just people. We need food, flowers, a cake, a sound system, and a venue. How do we get a handle on this?”

Resources are people, equipment, place, money, or anything else that you need in order to do all of the activities that you planned for. Every activity in your activity list needs to have resources assigned to it. Before you can assign resources to your project, you need to know their availability. Resource availability includes information about what resources you can use on your project, when they’re available to you, and the conditions of their availability.

Don’t forget that some resources, like consultants or training rooms, have to be scheduled in advance, and they might only be available at certain times. You’ll need to know this before you can finish planning your project. If you are starting to plan in January, a June wedding is harder to plan than one in December, because the wedding halls are all booked up in advance. That is clearly a resource constraint. You’ll also need the activity list that you created earlier, and you’ll need to know how your organization typically handles resources. Once you’ve got a handle on these things, you’re set for resource estimation.

Estimating the Resources

The goal of activity resource estimating is to assign resources to each activity in the activity list. There are five tools and techniques for estimating activity resources.

Estimating Activity Duration

Once you’re done with activity resource estimating, you’ve got everything you need to figure out how long each activity will take. That’s done in a process called activity duration estimating. This is where you look at each activity in the activity list, consider its scope and resources, and estimate how long it will take to perform.

Estimating the duration of an activity means starting with the information you have about that activity and the resources that are assigned to it, and then working with the project team to come up with an estimate. Most of the time you’ll start with a rough estimate and then refine it to make it more accurate. You’ll use these five tools and techniques to create the most accurate estimates:

The activity duration estimates are an estimate of how long each activity in the activity list will take. This is a quantitative measure usually expressed in hours, weeks, days, or months. A small job (like booking a DJ) may be very quick; a bigger job (like catering, including deciding on a menu, ordering ingredients, cooking food, and serving guests on the big day) could take days.

Another thing to keep in mind when estimating the duration of activities is determining the effort involved. Duration is the amount of the time that an activity takes, while effort is the total number of person-hours that are expended. If it takes two people six hours to carve the ice sculpture for the centerpiece of a wedding, the duration is six hours. But if two people worked on it for the whole time, it took 12 person-hours of effort to create.

If we go back to our case study of the wedding, we can see that while Sally has a handle on how long things are going to take, she still has some work to do before she has the whole project under control. What about the caterer? They have no idea who’s going to be providing food. And what about the band they want? Will the timing with their schedule work out? “If the caterers come too early, the food will sit around under heat lamps. But if they come too late, the band won’t have time to play. I just don’t see how we’ll ever work this out.”

It’s not easy to plan for a lot of resources when they have tight time restrictions and overlapping constraints. How do you figure out a schedule that makes everything fit together? You’re never going to have the complete resource picture until you have finished building the schedule. It’s only when you lay out the schedule that you’ll figure out that some of your activities and durations don’t quite work.

Project Schedule and Critical Path

The project schedule should be approved and signed off by stakeholders and functional managers. This ensures they have read the schedule, understand the dates and resource commitments, and will cooperate. You’ll also need to obtain confirmation that resources will be available as outlined in the schedule. The schedule cannot be finalized until you receive approval and commitment for the resource assignments outlined in it. Once the schedule is approved, it will become your baseline for the remainder of the project. Project progress and task completion will be monitored and tracked against the project schedule to determine if the project is on course as planned.

The schedule can be displayed in a variety of ways, some of which are variations of what you have already seen. Project schedule network diagrams will work as schedule diagrams when you add the start and finish dates to each activity. These diagrams usually show the activity dependencies and critical path.

The critical path method is an important tool for keeping your projects on track. Every network diagram has something that is called the critical path. It’s the string of activities that, if you add up all of the durations, is longer than any other path through the network. It usually starts with the first activity in the network and usually ends with the last one.

The reason that the critical path is critical is that every single activity on the path must finish on time in order for the project to come in on time. A delay in any one of the critical path activities will cause the entire project to be delayed (Figure 10.1^[1]).

Knowing where your critical path is can give you a lot of freedom. If you know an activity is not on the critical path, then you know a delay in that activity may not necessarily delay the project. This can really help you handle emergency situations. Even better, it means that if you need to bring your project in earlier than was originally planned, you know that adding resources to the critical path will be much more effective than adding them elsewhere.

It’s easy to find the critical path in any project. Of course, on a large project with dozens or hundreds of tasks, you’ll probably use software like Microsoft Project to find the critical path for you. But when it does, it’s following the same exact steps that are followed here

Resource Management

Resource management is the efficient and effective deployment of an organization’s resources when they are needed. Such resources may include financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology (IT). In the realm of project management, processes, techniques, and philosophies for the best approach for allocating resources have been developed. These include discussions on functional versus cross-functional resource allocation as well as processes espoused by organizations like the Project Management Institute (PMI) through the methodology of project management outlined in their publication A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Resource management is a key element to activity resource estimating and project human resource management. As is the case with the larger discipline of project management, there are resource management software tools available that automate and assist the process of resource allocation to projects.

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

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 behaviour (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.

Assess Your Understanding

Attribution

This chapter is based on chapter 11 in Project Management by Adrienne Watt is a derivative the following texts:

• Project Management by Merrie Barron and Andrew Barron CC BY
• Project Management/PMBOK/Human Resources Management and Development Cooperation Handbook/How do we manage the human resources of programmes and projects?/Manage the Project Team by Wikibooks. CC BY-SA (
• Resource Management, Edgar Schein, and Resource Leveling by Wikipedia.CC BY-SA
• Project Management for Instructional Designers by Amado, M., et.al. CC BY.