Project Team
Management
Resource Plan
Accountable
for project team management for an information management project and
want
some practical time and cost saving suggestions?
A resource plan is part of a project
implementation plan and
should list
all project roles and responsibilities, level of effort,
and other project team resource requirements.
Sounds easy!
Information management projects have a small number of roles and
responsibilities –Lets put everyone in a room for three
months and hope for the best.
This approach has merit if the team is a
self-contained unit responsible for producing project deliverables and
turning them over to production with no support from other IT
resources.
Unfortunately, we need to take off the “rose colored
glasses” and look
at reality.
Project team
management reality check!
Many IT departments are very large, sometimes with two or three
thousand employee’s/contractors and consulting
staff.
These resources are frequently geographically dispersed in different
cities and/or in different countries.
IT staff may be assigned to resource managers, who have responsibility
for assigning them to projects. Others may be part of an IT resource
pool and are assigned on a first come basis by a central resource
planning system. In other words, if you want a data modeler for two
weeks in September, you submit your request and you get the first
person available.
To
ensure complete resource planning...
Consider
all of the “extra” resources that will be required to make a project
successful. The following provides a sample of resources that
may be considered for project team management:
- Center
of
excellence staff may be required to participate in project
deliverable reviews. These reviews may not require too much time but
project delays will occur if they are a critical part of deliverable
acceptance and no one is available or assigned;
- Legacy source
system production support staff may be required to produce
“new interfaces” and “push" data for your solution—Failure to consider
them early will cause delays while your team waits;
- Vendor
supplied support staff may be required to help extract
data from CRM and ERP applications. Obtaining this support may involve
creating statements
of work and getting financial and technical approval—All
if this takes time and must be considered in the resource plan;
- An independent
QA team may be required and the plan should include
provision for QA management time and “ramp-up” learning;
- Production
support staff may be required to help execute tests during
QA testing—It is important that this time be included in the plan; and
- There are
numerous other
resources that may be required to ensure project
success--They all must be included
in the resource plan.
To provide
resource flexibility, consider...
Other resource options, if permitted, such as:
- Individual contract
employee support--Is it practical to engage them for short
time periods?
- Consulting firm "time
and
material" contracts;
- Consulting firm "fixed
price"
contracts;
- Off-shore
development;
- Part-time
contractor support--Do
you really need someone full-time
or can some work be handled by 10-200 hours per week on a contract basis?
How are
project team management resource plans created?
This depends upon the organization and the project planning tools.
In some places, it is mandatory that the project plan be included in a
central time reporting system. Resources are allocated based on your
projections and their availability. Time cannot be reported to a
project unless a task has been assigned to a resource.
This approach has merit but must be carefully managed to ensure that
staff allocations are not too restrictive. In other words, don’t plan a
lot of very short (e.g. 5 hour tasks)...but don’t plan any three-month
tasks either.
What are other critical resources?
Plan early to obtain other needed resources such as:
- Team rooms with white-boards (and markers);
- Overhead projectors;
- Software test tools;
- Specialized development software and licenses
and/or access for all team members. Failure to do this early may case
delays as the team waits to gain access to critical tools.
To
minimize project expense, consider…
- Do you need all team members at every weekly
status meeting or will status reports suffice for the peripheral
resources (I have seen many projects with 30-40 team members
faithfully attending meetings and reporting time when their actual
contribution may not be required for three to four months downstream);
and
- Make everyone aware of the resource estimates
and expectations. Review, and secure approval for all estimates, with
individual resource managers. Try to avoid the lone contractor who, in
good faith, spends three
weeks developing
a solution that was only expected to take three days.
Summary...
Project team management is a critical part of a successful
information management project and
a good resource plan should list all project roles and
responsibilities, level of effort,
and other project team resource requirements.
This planning must be completed early in the project and communicated
clearly to all project team members to set expectations.
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