Overview
Are you looking for a new strategy to help improve your overall business health and increase successful business outcomes? It may be time to reassess your resource capacity planning strategy. Does your organization constantly experience resourcing conflicts that hamper your speed and overall effectiveness? Are your PMO’s resource allocation decisions reliant on a roster of who is available right now rather than who is the right person for this specific project?
These operational trends reflect deficiencies in your resource capacity planning. While these problems may seem like a common struggle in doing business, the reality is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In a rapidly changing business environment, you can’t afford to let solvable problems impact your speed and agility. Here are three ways project portfolio management can optimize resource capacity planning and empower your PMO to help your business achieve peak efficiency.
Increase Visibility
In order to know where resource pain points are, your PMO needs broad visibility into your operations — a bird’s eye view of everything that is happening all at once. Visibility doesn’t just inform your PMO which resources are available and when - it allows them to drill down into specifics: Who has the best skillset/capability for completing this task? Who has too much on their plate at this time? Who has minimal work at the moment and needs a new assignment?
If your resources are commonly coming up short, visibility gives your PMO the information needed to improve. PPM provides visibility into what the true capacity is for resources based on realtime information. Whether it is skill shortage or overall headcount shortages, you can determine exactly how much demand you can complete with your capacity with better visibility across the portfolio.
Improve Forecasting
If your PMO spends more time putting out fires than planning for the future, improving your resource capacity planning strategy is imperative. Reduce the strain on your PMO by empowering team members with the ability to master resource forecasting.
KeyedIn PPM software provides accurate, real time capacity information for improved forecasting. Keep your forecast up to date with utilization tracking, variance monitoring, and availability heat maps. Model scenarios and make informed decisions when changes impact your resource forecast.
Protect Your Bottom Line
No business in history has ever complained about protecting profits and reducing unnecessary expenses. Proper resource capacity planning will help your PMO constantly measure your organization’s resource demands against your actual ability to fulfill them. When your PMO has mastered the right strategy, they can easily discover shortfalls and quickly seek new ways to mitigate them. This means fewer delays that impact your customers, improved delivery on promises made and greater efficiency across each project from start to finish.
In short, you can avoid project cost overruns, missed deadlines and, most importantly, unsatisfied customers, as well as delivering increased visibility, improved forecasting and a more-secure bottom line!
Conclusion
Well-executed, agile resource capacity planning is an excellent way to improve business health and profitability while also empowering your PMO members to do their jobs more effectively – a win for all stakeholders.
