Resource Planning Implementation – How to Be Quick and Successful with 6 Clear Steps

Are you planning a professional resource planning implementation to quickly optimize your planning, identify and resolve conflicts in good time? If so, this article is just right for you. The following practical tips should allow you – for instance in the role of PMO – to quickly reach your goal.

The following chapters are waiting for you:

• Is resource planning really that complicated?
• Why start with the team leaders?
• Resource planning implementation in 6 steps
  • Step 1: Promote the benefits
  • Step 2: Start by planning a first representative team
  • Step 3: Conduct the first planning session
  • Step 4: Introduce a coordination process with regular planning intervals
  • Step 5: Regular operations and optimizing team planning
  • Step 6: Implementing and optimizing project planning
• Conclusion – Resource planning implementation in 6 steps

Let us delve in.

Is Resource Planning Really That Complicated?

Project resource management is often regarded as complicated because:

• Project managers themselves often cannot plan exactly who will be required on the project at exactly what time
• The availability is often unforeseeable, especially when it comes to internal staff

In addition, it is often assumed that you can only allocate projects and activities properly if you have an overview of who is working on what, and when. Many believe you need sound project planning first of all, but this is not correct!

You can also start by implementing proper resource planning using the approach via the team leaders. And this does not have to be complicated, if you proceed as described below. In our experience, you could even reach your goal in around two months.

Why Start with the Team Leaders?

The figure below reveals the difference in implementation time between starting with the team leaders and starting with the project managers. You will reach your goal much faster with the overall planning of the resources by the team leaders. The detailed resource planning from the projects, albeit incomplete in total, takes considerably longer.

What is the reason for this striking difference? Among the most important causes are the following:

• When introducing project management, you will have to establish several processes and methods which are unnecessary for tactical resource management.
• The number of project managers tends to be higher than that of team leaders. Thus, their training will take longer to begin with. What is more, they must invest much more work into the detailed planning of their projects than team leaders into their overview.
• Projects have a start and a finish date. Team planning occurs without start and finish date month after month.
• It is not worth introducing a new system for projects that are almost completed. Hence, you transfer only long-running and new projects into the new system.

For these reasons, it will take many months to reach the desired situation. Eventually, you will get an overview of the resource utilization from the overall planning of many project managers. Yet even this overall planning will only include project activities. Operations and absences, which also reduce the capacity, are not taken into consideration.

Activities Outside of Projects Are Not Considered

This means that the resource utilization is still far from complete with the approach via the project managers. Yet, this is exactly what matters. For only a complete resource overview is useful. And this you can easily obtain from the team leaders.

You can start complete resource planning in your teams any time. Besides absences and operations, you should consider all projects at least roughly at the highest level.

Even without knowing the details at the level of tasks, you should be able to assign people to projects with a share of hours per month.

Our tip: A resource overview is only useful when it is complete. The team leaders can actually provide one easily. This is what you should begin with when implementing resource planning.

Team Leaders Should Know Their Team Members’ Responsibilities

As a rule, team leaders know what the members of their team are working on. At the very least, they know:

1. In which projects they are involved
2. When they are absent
3. What other responsibilities they have

They may not always know the details, but their knowledge of the employees’ activities is comprehensive.

Without an adequate overview, the team leader will not be able to explain the team’s workload. For instance, he or she will struggle to clarify why a new project request will not fit into the team’s current resource utilization. All the same, this tends to be one of the key reasons for implementing resource management in the first place.

To respond to questions of availability, team leaders do not need perfect and detailed planning. Chiefly, they require a complete overview of all resources and their respective activities. The team leader gains a lot by having more or less accurate answers to these questions. This is significantly better than a wrong answer.

It is a great but avoidable mistake to make commitments which cannot be kept. The usual reason is that activities were neglected when calculating the workload.

Apart from that, the team leaders’ planning almost always fluctuates except for vacation and a few regular meetings. After all, it is usually based on estimates.

The key difference lies in this: are you surprised that team members do not have time?

1. Is this because they are pursuing activities the team leaders are unacquainted with? That is bad. You will need to work on your team resource planning methods.
2. Or are known activities simply taking longer than assumed? This is easier to justify.

Only Complete Resource Planning is Useful

Therefore, the primary objective is not necessarily perfect resource planning. What you need is complete resource planning. Resource planning only begins to be useful once it is complete. The initial complete plan can be refined in further steps.

Later, you can mainly improve one thing: the regular and increasingly more specific coordination with the project managers. The rest lies in the team leaders’ responsibility anyway. And soon it will also be available in the right system.

Our tip: What you require first is complete, not perfect, resource planning. It only begins to be useful once it is complete. Missing details can be added later.

Resource Planning Implementation in 6 Steps

So much for the background. Now, you will learn how to approach resource planning implementation via the team leaders.

Step 1: Promote the Benefits

If you want to persuade the team leaders, you need to highlight the benefits of a central system for resource planning as follows:

• Decision-makers receive utilization overviews of all teams. As a rule, these are aggregated. Yet, the decision-makers have the option to “drill down” to every individual team. This provides them with all the necessary details to make informed decisions.
• Team leaders obtain valid utilization overviews. These enable them to achieve the best possible utilization of their team, without overload.
• Project managers obtain more reliable commitments regarding:
  • the availability of suitable resources (in matrix organizations)
  • delivery dates of results (in line organizations)

Do some marketing for the resource planning implementation! Get the affected people involved. But watch out: be aware that you are also creating a transparency some team leaders may not be comfortable with.

Another interesting read: The Challenges of Project Management Resource Planning

Another important point is to reach an agreement with the employee organization / works council at an early stage, as they might suspect the possibility of unjustified surveillance of the employees. However, this should not cause any real problems, since:

• The users of the planning data are the team leaders
• These are the direct supervisors; and, for the benefit of their employees, they can now plan a better utilization
• The aim is to avoid overload; less overplanning means less stress for the employees

Our tip: Turn affected people into proponents. Thus, they will support you in advocating the implementation of a solution for tactical resource planning. And be aware that not all team leaders will appreciate this new transparency.

Step 2: Start by Planning for a First Representative Team

If changes are due, consider first: what has worked well in which area so far? What have team leaders been planning to date? And with how much detail?

Find out the team resource planning methods and data that have been tried and tested and adopt them.

Look for Team Leaders as Proponents

Identify a known well-organized team. And make sure its team leader is willing to support your undertaking and team resource planning methods. You need a template that can be used by everyone. Ideally, you will not start by creating this template in Excel. Instead, use suitable team management software for team leaders. In this way, you point your colleagues in the right direction from the get-go.

Define the Granularity of Your Planning

Define the planning granularity in weeks or months. Planning in quarters tends to be too rough; days are usually too detailed. This mostly depends on the duration of tasks and the planning intervals.

Should you plan in hours, days or FTEs (Full Time Equivalents)? This is also determined by the scope of the tasks. It may be better to enter the number of days than several hundred hours.

Wondering how resource planning works? Find a few answers in our
Project Resource Management article.

On the other hand, hours are always without ambiguity. In the case of part-time employees, days can raise the question of how these are to be understood. FTEs are an attempt at bypassing this question. The concept needs to be explained all the same.

Record Activities and Assign Categories

• Define rows for absences. At best, these are vacation and other. As a rule, it is not permitted to enter illness. The employee organization / works council is particularly vigilant in this respect.
• Define rows for general operations per team that apply to most team members. These can be activities such as team meetings, further training, presales, support, etc. Maintain these rows in the team manager tool for all team members.
• Identify the individual operations of each team member. In contrast to the general operations, these can change over time. And they must not relate to deliverables within projects.
• Record all projects in which your team members are involved. Start with one row per project. You may not have any usable planning data from the projects. In such a case, begin by falling back on the team leader’s and the team members’ knowledge.

As repeatedly stated, mind the completeness of the activities more than the specificity. It is much more important to get an approximate overview of which projects are actually being worked on.

But it is problematic to plan individual tasks in detail for some projects while others are not considered at all. Simply because some details are missing.

The point is to record everything to begin with. Thus, you obtain a complete picture, albeit your first draft.

Our tip: Mind the completeness of the recorded activities more than the specificity of your planning. It is important to obtain a complete picture for a start. Otherwise, your planning will contain an unknown quantity of error. This is not conducive to reliable resource planning.

Based on this, you can establish coordination processes with the project managers. Thus, they stand on a better footing from the outset.

Involve the Project Managers Gradually

There is no need to involve all project managers at once. This can happen step by step. Some projects are about to be completed. Planning them in detail is not worth the effort. Others may only start in a few months. In both cases, rough planning is sufficient. This can be because detailed planning may not be worth pursuing:

1. yet
2. anymore

But one thing is always wrong: not to plan something only because it cannot be as specific as you would like it to be.

Involve Further Team Leaders and Optimize the System Together

Present the result to the other team leaders and integrate their feedback. After all, each person must:

1. Understand the structure
2. Accept the granularity of the planning

Step 3: Conduct the First Planning Session

Before defining the processes, ensure that the team leaders involved become familiar with:

1. The tool
2. The planning effort

Of course, you can also define the planning intervals first. And begin to populate the tool afterwards.

But in our experience, organizations tend to take on more than they can actually accomplish. That is why it often makes sense to let all team leaders gather experience with the initial planning for their team. Only then, do you define the intervals at which you update the planning.

A good tool for team planning must be a simple one. Normally, a team leader should not need to spend more than two hours per week on team planning.

But the initial planning is bound to take longer because the users must:

1. Familiarize themselves with the structures
2. Get to know the tool

In addition, various data will not be as readily available as hoped-for.

Good Support of the Team Leaders is Vital

Ensure that the team leaders have good support. Planning has to be a positive experience for them from the start. Some will require more support than others will.

It is vital to convince as many team leaders as possible in the first round. They need to recognize the benefits of working with their own real data.

Our tip: At all events, ensure good support for the team leaders in the first few weeks. For them, planning must be a positive, smooth experience without difficulties from the start. And never stop communicating the benefits of working with your own data.

Set Guidelines for Data Maintenance

Define steps to be completed when entering the data. The following entries are necessary:

• All team members and their capacities (ideally, the system will have been populated automatically for every team with the resources and their capacities; the data is derived from their work schedules)
• All project requests for team members (can possibly be imported from other systems)
• Absences and general operations (can possibly be imported from other systems)
• All projects at team level (can possibly be imported from other systems)
• Individual operations of all team members
• All project commitments for the coming e.g. 3 months

Choose Preliminary Intervals between Updates

Choose the update frequency that seems reasonable to you. Maybe, you start with a weekly interval. Thus, you might obtain an initial overview of all teams showing the current status consistently.

Naturally, it will include overload yet to be resolved. However, you can only work this out together and at the intervals you determine. Next, it is necessary to coordinate the planning intervals. All involved must be able to comply with them.

Step 4: Introduce a Coordination Process with Regular Planning Intervals

As mentioned above, we strongly advise you to introduce a regular process cycle at your company. And this has to be lived. For the requests from projects tend to change dynamically. But the team leaders cannot reschedule their team planning every day.

Therefore, it is necessary for the planning to be up to date by the due date. In the case of resource conflicts, all team leaders and project managers involved have the same current basis for decisions.

You should still get used to the fact that resource planning cannot always be 100 per cent specific. External interferences often come sooner than you can adjust your planning.

This is how you approach the introduction of regular planning intervals:

• Identify the parties involved in the process (project manager, team leader and the PMO).
• Come to an agreement with them as to which intervals are appropriate for resource coordination at your company. If in doubt, begin with longer intervals. This will allow you to actually perform the update.
• Ensure that the commitment of the resources is fixed for the current and the following interval. This is the only way to achieve consistent resource utilization.
• Assist the project managers in updating their project plans in line with the agreed intervals. You always need the total current resource requirements at once.
• Coordinate the use of resources with the team leaders based on the current project planning.
• Resolve resource conflicts project managers and team leaders cannot eliminate in a steering committee. This committee should be made up of the appropriate decision-makers.
• In a multi-project environment, top management will first have to define the priorities for this in the course of strategic resource planning (also known as capacity planning).

Interested in the strategic side of resource planning? Read about Capacity Planning.

The figure below shows such a process cycle across the levels of the roles involved.

Step 5: Regular Operations and Optimizing Team Planning

Run through the planning cycle a few times. Once it is more or less stable, you can start optimizing it. What is the situation at your company at this point in time?

• Have the promised benefits of the new resource planning materialized?
• Are team leaders, project managers and decision-makers working with better overviews?
• And can they use these as a basis for their decisions?
• Does everyone succeed in updating their plans on time?
• Are the coordination meetings successful?

The following results are likely:

1. In some areas your planning was perhaps too rough
2. In others it may have been unnecessarily detailed

The task at hand is to strike a balance between effort and benefit and optimize it. This can take several weeks or even months.

You could even implement some technical interfaces. These would enable you to synchronize data regarding capacities and absences automatically from HR systems. Or you may automate the interfaces between project planning and team planning using the appropriate integration middleware.

Step 6: Implementing and Optimizing Project Planning

Up to now, you have advanced resource planning on the team leaders’ side. This has allowed you to achieve a complete overview of the workload and availability of team members quickly. Now you need to advance the processes, methods and tools for project planning. The PMO is responsible for doing this.

If you are interested in this part you might want to download our free PMO Survey.

Resource Planning as a Problem for PMOs

And one final note: Our extensive PMO Survey 2020 came to an interesting conclusion based on the feedback from 330 companies. The lack of transparency in resource planning is one of the top 4 obstacles to greater PMO acceptance. The approach described above may be a good remedy for this.

Conclusion – Resource Planning Implementation in 6 Steps

In this article, you have learned how to approach resource planning implementation and that this can even be a fast process. Choose the approach via the team leaders. They already have a lot of current and important information that needs to be consolidated.

This assumes that you stick to the proposed “basic rules” when implementing resource management. Use the 6 steps described above as a guide to resource planning implementation.

However, always bear the following in mind: the goal is not perfect but complete resource planning. This will provide the basis to make it work for you, too.

Our final tips

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What has been your experience with resource planning implementation? Or is there anything you would like to add? Please leave a comment below.

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