Enterprise Resource Planning — Best Practices
Many young technical team leads don’t appreciate the need for resource planning. As it is tedious and time consuming. Here is my take on…
Many young technical team leads don’t appreciate the need for resource planning. As it is tedious and time consuming. Here is my take on the importance of resourcing planning in an enterprise and best practices to make it productivity.
Any project starts with resource planning. Many of the technical leads do this just before the project starts. This could create problems if there are no resources available at that time.
In today’s world, recruitment is not easy and has a long cycle to get approvals, identifying the right skillset, offer rollout with negotiations and onboarding. So a reactive approach will never work.
A proactive approach to allocate / plan resources to future projects becomes a necessary and in-turn building a optimised bench will help save lot of time and effort.
But it is not easy to perform a pro-active resource allocation in many organisation due to the following reasons.
- there is no visibility of future projects
- concept of optimised bench is not present
- backfills are not tracked or deprioritised
- visibility on current allocation is not maintained or not transparent
There are so many SaaS apps that can help you to solve the above problems. But there is an effort needed by the organisation to build the hygiene in the process for solving the above problems.
Following are my suggestion on the best practices for resource planning that are easy to adopt.
#1 Centralisation
The data about allocation is so spread across in so many excel sheets and so many versions. This will create less visibility and hides the risks.
So centralising the information about allocation is a must. A common excel sheet which is not that complex to understand must be used.
This will help in uncovering any risks or gaps in the allocation.
#2 Future projects
The allocation data should not be only for known projects, it should for future ones as well. This will help to see whether enough resources are available for those future projects.
If there is a question that not always future projects are known, then, put place holders in the allocation sheet and check whether the resources are available or not.
This will help in identifying the hiring needs for the future projects or freeing up resources from other projects, if needed.
#3 Bench optimisation
In my opinion, any team or department should have some form of bench resources. You can name it whatever you want.
The optimised bench or strategically making few resources available for unknown scenario will always come in handy to save the day.
Creation and managing this strategically placed resource will be important.
#4 Cost analysis
Most of the times we allocate resources and forget about the cost. Every allocation of a resource should have a cost associated with it.
This will help to check and control the right skilled resource are getting assigned and not anyone one in the team gets assigned.
The cost may not have direct impact, but it will create a situation of strategically allocating the resources rather than randomly selecting available resources for allocation.
This will decrease margin of the project as costly resources getting assigned for smaller project will not make sense.
#5 Adopt tools
Don’t continue to perform resource allocation in excel sheets. Try to adopt a tool which is available online and has an easy to use interface for allocating and deallocating resources.
Over a time, excel sheet will become large, cumbersome, less effective. Instead of helping you to manage the allocation, it will become an overhead.
So adopting a tool which fits in the organisation or department budget will ease this process.
#6 Continuous review
Don’t allocate and forget. This is one of the worst mistake that many managers do.
There must be a biweekly review of the allocation with all the stakeholders, so that, in case there is any change it can be made before its too late.
So create a practice of continuous review of the allocation.
In conclusion, a proative planning of allocation for the known and future projects will help to optimise the overheads of understanding how resources are allocated and the gaps.
Happy management.
