Resource Planning. Part 1. What is it all about?

What is most valuable for an IT company? What is the main asset and resource for almost every IT company? What does the company spend the most money on? What is the largest cost item? Which resource does it take you the most money to service? I’m not much mistaken if I say that the answer to all these questions is “Company Team”. It is your team that makes the projects, moves your company forward and makes money, and it is the salaries, bonuses, taxes, equipment of jobs and other direct and indirect payments to your team that account for the bulk of the company's expenses.

If at the right time you will not have enough of your key resource, then you will not be able to make an important project and miss the benefit. And if you have an excess of resources, then you will incur losses by paying for the idle part of your team. Let's talk about resource planning.

The topic of resource planning is surprisingly poorly represented both in specialized literature and on Runet spaces. It is assumed that project and company managers themselves know what it is and how to work with it. As experience shows, this is a bit wrong. Of course, everyone understands that paying a salary to an employee who does nothing is bad. It’s also bad when you don’t have enough resources. But this understanding is not always enough to establish effective resource planning in the company. And what to do? I will try to share my understanding of the issue.

I plan to state my understanding something like this:

1. What is a resource plan? Here we draw a picture, give some definitions and tell how people differ from money.
2. What does a resource plan affect? Consider the areas of activity of IT companies, which, it turns out, are directly dependent on the quality of resource planning. And if your resource planning is not carried out at the proper level or suddenly you don’t have it at all, then, after reading this part, you will have logical questions.
3. What affects the resource plan? We consider the inverse problem - what the resource plan depends on, what is at the entrance and determines the shape, size and specifics of the resource plan
4. Resource planning as part of an isolated project. This is resource planning from the point of view of the leader of a particular project, which has an understanding of the task, budget and needs to form a team and implement the project. Also, a checklist is planned here, having run through which it will be possible to understand, but have we included everything necessary in the resource plan?
5. Resource planning for a portfolio of projects or programs. And this is resource planning from the point of view of the program director, project portfolio manager, resource manager or company manager, where many projects are simultaneously running, they are all in different phases and all of them require and release resources.
6. Long-term resource planning. If we get to this point, then we will consider the task of managing the resource pools of the company in the long term.

What is a resource plan?

I will give an example of a resource plan for seed

As an example, we see a resource plan for a conditional project along with financial information and some analytics. Depending on the level of access of the project manager and the specifics of internal processes, the resource plan can vary widely. In particular, by removing salaries and hourly rates, one can limit oneself only to planning man-hours.

If you try to google on the topic of resource management / resource planning tool, then you will get a pretty impressive list of paid (for the most part) and free tools that help to one degree or another in solving the resource management problem. Well, we will use the good old MS Excel.

Now let's agree on the terms:

• Resource - a specialist with the necessary specialization and experience. Moreover, experience is understood not only as the total number of years that a person has already managed to devote to his profession, but also experience with specific projects. This is a key moment and we will return to it.
  
  
• Internal resource pool - a department or unit that has the necessary resources that can be used on the project. Examples: FrontEnd department / department, QA department / department, project management department / department, etc. Compared to external resource pools, the advantages of internal ones are efficient communications, guaranteed qualifications, and good manageability. Cons - do not scale well.
  
  
• External resource pool - a company or specialists external to the company that implements the project, who have the necessary resources and are ready to provide their project for temporary use. Examples: sites of freelancers, companies specializing in outsourcing, partner companies with temporarily underloaded resources. Pros Compared to Internal Resource Pools: Scalable. Cons: the complexity of communications, expensive management, unguaranteed quality of resources, cost, overhead for administration.
  
  
• An inconsistent (unsettled) resource plan is an application for resources to carry out a project. Such a resource plan tells you what resources, when, in what quantity and for what period you need in order for you to successfully complete your project. At the same time, instead of first names and surnames in this plan there are dashes or spaces - there are no real people yet, you only want to get them. So far, you can only determine the requirements for specialists that you need, and perhaps formulate wishes for resource managers regarding specific candidates that you would like to see on your project. Some positions, of course, may already be “stuffed up" - specific names of people are written down, for which you already have confirmation of their participation in your project.
  
  
• An agreed (stale) resource plan is a contract for the supply of resources of the required quality for a specific time with the owners of resource pools. The difference from the previous version - all dashes are replaced by real names and surnames.
  
  
• Staffing- The process of selection and coordination of resources for unstable positions of the resource plan. Simply put, staffing is the selection of a team for a project. It is important to note here that it is very rare that a project manager receives employees on his project that fully comply with the stated requirements. Everyone wants a project team that is 100% composed of senior designers, developers, analysts and testers, but not everyone gets such teams. Also, it is not always possible to get people to the right time or at the right time. Therefore, the plan may change as staffing. If the quality of resources is worse than that which was laid during the evaluation of the project, then obviously the number of hours for the same work is increasing. If the desired resource is released from another project sooner or later than you planned,

So how do people differ from money?

To better understand the essence of resource management, let's draw an analogy with financial management:

The analogy is not limited to these cases. A common observed pattern - in almost every case of resource management, you can find an analogy from financial management and vice versa. However, there is a very significant difference between money and resources, which determines the specifics of this subject area.

In the world of money, if you borrow 100,000 rubles from a bank, you can immediately start spending, investing, etc. - the money will immediately begin to work, it does not need to be taught. In the world of resource management, if you borrow two developers, they usually cannot immediately start benefiting your project. Because, unlike money, the value of a resource is determined not only by its qualifications and level of ownership of a particular tool, but also by knowledge of the specifics of your particular project. And this knowledge can only be acquired while inside your project, spending some time studying it.

It is on this subject that disputes often arise with a customer who needs to implement one or another unscheduled function as soon as possible. As a rule, the customer’s rhetoric can be something like this: “Your company has XXX tens / hundreds / thousands of people, add another Y to the project and do what we want.” The truth of the customer is that yes, in your company, as a rule, there are really quite a lot of qualified people who could do what he wants. But he does not take into account the fact that in order to start implementing these requirements, qualified specialists from other projects need to acquire the necessary knowledge about your project, and this takes time that you do not have.

Hence the conclusion - when managing resources, you always need to remember that a newly added resource, no matter how qualified it is, will take some time to dive into the project and only then it will start to produce results. The time it takes to dive depends on the qualification of the resource, the degree of its familiarity with the subject area and the project, the information infrastructure of the project and the availability of people nearby who can tell in an accessible form about the project and show how it works.

This is the end of the first part. In the next part, we’ll talk about what the resource plan and the quality of resource planning affect.