Resource Planning Tools: Software Requirements for Roles in Project Environments

Many companies try to cover the multitude of tasks in the project environment using only their project management tool – i.e. a tool intended for project managers. Yet, for the other stakeholders’ tasks, this is usually inadequate. For example, to achieve optimal resource utilisation, resource planning tools are much better suited and will be more widely accepted.

In this article, you will learn about the requirements for resource planning tools in project environments, depending on the role of the stakeholders. We will look at the challenges and how they can be met with suitable resource scheduling tools.

Key Takeaways

• When planning resources, do not rely solely on traditional project management tools. Take into account the different requirements of the roles involved and choose tools that best support their respective duties.
• Establish a shared planning framework for all roles: i.e. decision-makers, project managers, team leaders, team members and the PMO. This is the only way to obtain a realistic overview of capacity utilisation, availability and resource requirements.
• Do not rely solely on project-related planning. You should also take into account operations, absences and other commitments to make reliable assessments of the resource situation.
• Ensure that each role gets exactly the information they need to make decisions – from strategic capacity planning to operational work planning.
• If needed, combine different resource planning tools via integration instead of insisting on a single solution for all scenarios. This will increase acceptance, transparency and planning quality in the entire project environment.

We will cover the following topics:

• Roles involved in resource planning
• Characteristics of Excel solutions
• Decision-maker requirements for resource planning tools
• Project manager requirements for resource planning tools
• Team leader requirements for resource planning tools
• Involving team members
• Conclusion – Resource planning tools for the roles involved

Roles Involved in Resource Planning

The roles involved in the project environment and their duties and are roughly:

• Decision-maker – strategic planning and portfolio management
• Project manager – project planning and resource requirements
• Team leader – providing, and ensuring the availability of, the appropriate resources
• Team members – task planning and notification of completion
• PMO – coordination and quality assurance

Also interesting: Define project roles up-front with a role clarification workshop.

Characteristics of Excel Solutions

Up to a certain team size, planning in Excel for individual teams may make sense, even without additional programming.

But it tends to get complicated:

• with a large number of team members
• when planning for more than one team

Other departments may also depend on the structured transfer of data from the teams. This poses the next challenge.

Advantages of an Excel Solution:

• Likely to be already available at the company, hence no additional licensing costs
• Quick setup of simple overviews
• Graphical analysis as desired
• Easy to use for the most part – anyone can “do” Excel
• Often high acceptance to begin with
• Usable offline
• Printable
• Programmable

If your Excel planning is well structured in the teams, for example by consistently using the same resource planning template, this is an advantage. It can provide a good basis for a database-supported solution once your company has “outgrown” the Excel solution.

Disadvantages of an Excel Solution:

• Data in single files tends to give rise to versioning problems.
• Working with the same data, or rather sharing one file, is uncomfortable.
• The possibility of making changes complicates a standard process across teams.
• Individual adjustments in the table structure make it difficult to compare files.
• Solutions programmed in Excel can be kept up to date only with high effort.
• Consolidating teams in an overview is only possible if the tables of all teams are identical in structure.
• Due to the different structures, planning data can rarely be used beyond the teams.
• It is not possible to query data across teams.
• Access permissions are hard to enforce.

A central database-supported tool with an easy-to-use user interface would resolve the disadvantages mentioned above.

All the same, many companies continue to work with Excel solutions and live with the disadvantages. This is because nobody at the company arranges for an alternative – a resource management tool that is truly suited to tactical resource management by the team leaders. The market now offers a wide range of options, even for the role of team leader. Find more information on this below.

Decision-Maker Requirements for Resource Planning Tools

Decision-makers must prioritise initiatives and projects based on the strategic plans. They are expected to launch the right projects and ensure that a sufficient number of the right people is available in the medium and long term to carry out these projects.

To accomplish this, they need:

• A good overview of all the current and new projects as well as the existing teams and their skills and available capacities.
• To develop possible scenarios for handling any possible project delays in a way that ensures the long-term optimal use of the resources based on the teams and their skills.
• The ability to search across sites, and even internationally, to find suitable people and teams for new projects.

The right tool must allow for a highly flexible view of the portfolio and its capacity utilisation:

• What expertise and skills does the project require?
• What expertise and skills are available at which sites, and which ones are missing?
• Which projects can be launched, and when?
• Which ongoing projects can (or must) be postponed?
• Which projects are lacking the necessary expertise and skills?
• For which areas must staff with specific skills be hired, trained or reassigned, etc.?

Learn more: Resource Management in Projects – Basics & Areas for Beginners

The ongoing and new projects are differentiated by color in a bar chart and the histograms. It must be possible to simply shift the bars representing the projects and thereby adjust the resource “peaks” to eliminate any significant overloads.

Users must be able to:

• Easily activate or deactivate a project
• Adjust the resource capacities
• Group resources by criteria such as skill set, site, team, project group, etc.
• Perform simulation tests and save the results of various possible scenarios

The problem:

Missing tool functionality: Many companies attempt to solve this problem using MS Excel. However, they fail due to the lack of reliable data as well as limitations in the way the data is depicted, such as the inability to simply group the resources or postpone a project.

Focus on planning details: It is impossible to perfectly plan all upcoming projects down to the last detail because of the uncertainty whether the project will ever actually be launched. In these cases, it is sufficient that their resource planning for multiple projects is “rough, but complete.” For long-term planning, one row per project and skill is generally enough. Planning on a monthly basis is sufficient.

Our tip: A rule of thumb in good planning for project, portfolio and resource management is that it is better for these plans to be rough but complete than detailed and incomplete.

The project manager can supply data from current projects, but planning estimates for new projects must be obtained from the sales team and / or product manager. You must also take into account the normal daily obligations and absences that are planned by team leaders.

A good resource scheduling tool accepts input from a variety of other systems and allows missing or new information to be added to existing scenarios later or entered manually. This information does not have to be very detailed, but it must accurately reflect the situation.

Further reading:

• PMO Tools for Successful Multi-Project Management
• Capacity Planning Tools: Enterprise Comparison and Selection Guide

Advantages of a good resource tool over Excel

• Easy ad-hoc optimisation of resource utilisation by mouse click
• Graphical simulation of the current state of projects and immediate view of the impact on the resources involved
• Summary of all the project data in one easy-to-read diagram

This way for more information on TPG CoReSuite PortfolioManager App.

---

Project Manager Requirements for Resource Planning Tools

Project managers are expected to deliver results, and this requires having the right people in the respective teams within the company. Using their project plans as a guide, they submit requests to the team leaders and then expect a firm commitment with regard to the resources.

The challenge here:

• If the project involves several hundred processes, the resource planning can quickly become extraordinarily complex.
• Many processes do not require these resources 100 percent of the time, but rather just a few hours now and then. This can be quite time-consuming to track.
• Many processes are difficult to plan precisely.

This means: When it comes to resource requirements, project managers can just provide estimates. Does this mean that more detail is needed? Preparing detailed estimates always requires investing more time and effort, and both are not always available. In our experience, detailed planning is not even necessary because the approach “rough, but complete” is the best strategy, also for the project managers.

Our tip: Plan your resources as work packages and phases on a weekly or monthly basis instead of tracking such minutiae as individual processes and days.

After all, as a project manager, you must coordinate the resource availability with team leaders for individual projects on a weekly or monthly basis. Resource management tools will help you determine:

• Which teams have which qualifications
• Which team can provide people (and how many) with the necessary qualifications
• Which teams can take responsibility for which work packages
• Why a particular person can no longer dedicate their time to a project
• Who is handling this person’s duties while they are on holiday
• How the team’s commitments can be balanced with the current project plans
• How the team’s commitments have changed
• What happens if the project is postponed

The project manager’s tools must cover the entire process. This is how it could be:

• Request: The project manager broadly plans the resources on various levels by allocating the teams or skills.
• Commitment: The team leader commits specific people to the project manager’s plans.
• Further specification: In the plan, the project manager replaces the generic teams or skills with the names of the people committed by the team leader.

Project managers need the ability to align the people promised by the team leaders with their latest project plan. This lets them see if their plan can be implemented with the available resources.

---

Team Leader Requirements for Resource Planning Tools

Team leaders act as a liaison between their supervisor and the project managers. In addition, they also serve as a leader to the team members.

Traditional team management: Together with their team, their job is to handle as many line duties and projects as possible. The goal is to get as much work out of the team as possible without overwhelming the team members.

Collaboration with stakeholders: Team leaders must always be ready to provide up-to-date information to the decision-makers, project managers and the team itself. This information relates to the team’s activities and that of individual team members as well.

Having a suitable and well-designed tool enables team leaders to quickly and reliably plan, present and provide the information needed to show:

• The team’s capacities and availability
• The expertise and skills of the team members
• The team’s current projects
• The amount of time that has been allocated for team meetings and other general operations
• The team’s responsibilities with regard to the general activities and how these are organised
• When each person can take a holiday and who will handle their duties while they are gone
• How much, and what type of, additional training the team is receiving
• The team’s capacity for the next 6, 12 or 18 months
• Whether the team is expected to take on additional new or existing responsibilities
• Which team members need help acquiring the necessary team expertise
• Who needs additional training so that the team’s duties can be better distributed among its members
• What additional training is needed, and when, to be ready for upcoming assignments
• Who is available to participate in new projects

Team leaders need a good tool designed specifically to provide this information. They can enter their own data about absences and operations of their team members into the tool and import the requirements from different projects. They need this to have a complete overview of their team’s available capacity. With simple traffic light symbols, it is easy to detect any overutilisation or underutilisation.

If there are resource requests for other projects, the tool should ideally allow these requests to be committed and added to the individual projects. In addition to the capacity utilisation indicator, there should also be an indicator (again using traffic light colors) to show the relationship between the resource requests and commitments for each project. Having this information facilitates targeted discussions between project manager and team leader regarding the optimum use of the available resources within the various projects.

Team leaders generally do not like using project planning tools because their duties do not involve scheduling processes and milestones or depicting the dependencies between selected processes. Rather, their job as resource planners is to organise the absences and operations within specific time frames.

Many team leaders therefore use MS Excel for this because it is simple yet gives them the overview they need.

The problems with Excel are, however: it does not let you:

• import data from a project management system
• generate an overview
• retrieve data centrally or make it available to others

It would therefore be better to use a team resource management tool that is equally easy to use yet stores this information in a database. This would enable team leaders to:

• Make their plans available for incorporation into the portfolio overview
• Import the project plans in the form of requests
• Import commitments to the requests
• Immediately recognise which projects have been postponed

Team leaders now always have a complete overview based on their own data, giving them the information they need for discussions with project managers.

Find out more about TPG CoReSuite TeamManager App, the modern tool for resource planning by team leaders and coordination with project managers.

---

Involving Team Members

The traditional comprehensive form of planning, in which all the details are included in a single plan, is no longer useful.

The trend is to use rough project plans combined with detailed task lists.

In this scenario, the project manager defines the project structure, its phases and milestones. At the lowest level are the work packages or sprints and iterations.

Concurrently, the team members prepare their task lists with detailed information about the individual work packages and / or iterations. This is normally not done using the project manager’s tool, but rather using their own work management tools which include Kanban, for example.

What exactly does this mean?

The project manager develops the project framework, and the team members provide the actual input. Thereby, a well-organised project plan is created, one with maybe a hundred lines instead of a thousand.

The advantages:

• A lean project plan provides a clear, usable overview of the planned deadlines and resources.
• Combining the rough project plan with the team member task lists results in a detailed plan with much more reliable estimates.
• This combined plan is much easier to manage than the project plan alone.

---

Interplay between Project and Work Management

So how are the project plans and task plans synchronised? Appropriate integration middleware solutions like TPG PSLink enable you to exchange and synchronise data and data structures between different systems automatically. For instance, this works between Jira or DevOps and the PPM system.

This is how:

• The deadlines listed in the project plan’s work packages are imported into the work planning system.
• The sum of efforts from the associated tasks is transferred from the corresponding work packages to the project plans.
• Information regarding the volume of tasks having the status open / in progress / waiting / done is very important to the project managers and must be re-synchronised with the other systems.

The benefits of combining the tools

With a suitable synchronisation method:

• Team members can plan more accurately
• Project managers simplify their resource planning
• People in both roles use the resource tools best suited to them without needless data duplication.

Project and Work Management in One Tool

There is an even more convenient option: the PPM system maps the links between tasks in the Gantt diagram with one or more action items for each task directly within a single system. TPG ProjectPowerPack includes this option.

In practical terms, this means that action items are directly linked to tasks in the Gantt chart. When a team checks off its tasks on the Kanban Board of TPG ProjectPowerPack, the progress in the Schedule is automatically updated. Project managers and the PMO see in real time how far along a work package really is – not based on estimates from the last status meeting but based on the action items that have been completed. It shows the proportion of completed action items compared to the total number of action items for this task (e.g. 1/2 means 1 out of 2).

This is complemented by a shared database in Microsoft Dataverse that brings together action items, risks, resources and costs. Project managers no longer have to switch between systems to get the full picture.

---

Conclusion – Resource Planning Tools for Project Roles

The growing skill shortage and competition for resources within companies has led to a paradigm shift in the field of project management. As you now know, the use of project plans for the planning of resources is increasingly being replaced by a combined plan involving the project (rough planning) and team (detailed planning). Because:

• Having rough estimates in the project plan simplifies control and monitoring.
• The detailed plans provided by the team provide a more realistic view of the necessary resources and their availability.
• This means that the team leaders and their teams are critical to effective resource management.
• Using effective resource planning tools gives the team leaders all the control and information necessary to get the job done.
• Decision-makers and PMOs thus receive the accurate information they need to make sound decisions with regard to coordination and strategic planning (e.g. for project portfolio management).

You have now read about several of the resource management tools available to help the stakeholders best meet the demands made on them and also integrate the diverse systems:

• Decision-makers (project portfolio management): Simulation, overview and optimisation of the resource utilisation are available with a few clicks in the TPG CoReSuite Portfolio Manager App.
• Project manager (project planning / resource requirements): Planning the processes for handling requests and commitments is done using TPG CoReSuite TeamManager App.
• Team leader (information / commitment of resources): Information is presented for the portfolio overview, and the requested resources are committed using TPG CoReSuite TeamManager App.
• Team members (work planning and notification of completion): Detailed plans derived from the task management tools are integrated with the project’s rough planning using the middleware TPG PSLink or in TPG ProjectPowerPack, a tool based on Microsoft Power Platform

Our final tips:

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management (PPM). Download the free eBook “The PPM Paradise” now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter with information on more hands-on articles, eBooks, etc. to improve your project management maturity level.

What has your experience with resource planning tools been? Let us know in the comment field below. We look forward to hearing from you.

print this article