Efficient resource planning is at the heart of efficient delivery of projects and business performance in general. But in a multi-project environment, it can be incredibly challenging to plan, allocate, and manage employees in such a way that they have balanced workloads, are productive, and contribute to seamless delivery of all projects.
Why is resource planning so important in multi-project management? And how to plan resources for multiple projects effectively? Let’s delve into these issues in the article.
What Is Resource Planning?
Resource planning is the process of identifying and allocating resources required for project completion. Project resources may involve personnel, equipment, tools, facilities, time, finance—everything that is essential for successful project completion. Resource planning is a comprehensive process that involves forecasting resource needs, assigning the right resources to the right projects and tasks, balancing workloads, and regular monitoring and control.
The term “resource planning” is related to and often confused with “resource capacity planning”. However, they aren’t the same. They both are equally important for effective resource management, especially for multiple projects. Here’s the difference between these practices in more detail.
- Resource planning aims to determine what resources are needed, when, and for what projects and tasks, as well as allocating them across projects.
- Resource capacity planning involves the analysis of the available capacity of resources in relation to the demand coming from multiple projects. In other words, it helps determine whether the available pool of resources can handle the workload across the whole multi-project environment.
Now that the essence of resource planning is clear, let’s review the significance of resource planning for multi-project management.
Importance of Resource Planning Across Multiple Projects
In a multi-project environment, the importance of resource planning cannot be overestimated—it ensures that all projects in the environment run smoothly without bottlenecks and delays. Without that, there’s a high risk of inability to assign the right resources to projects, imbalanced workloads, and missing due dates.
- Staffing current and future projects: Resource planning helps managers ensure that people with the right skills are available for projects when needed so that they can staff current projects properly. It also helps meet future staffing needs, which in turn prevents resource shortages, last-minute hiring, and spending extra costs.
- Maximizing the potential of available resources: When the right resources are assigned to the right projects and tasks, they work more efficiently, and there are fewer chances for unexpected hiring needs.
- Prevents resource shortages and bottlenecks: Resource planning involves staffing projects based on their requirements and resource availability, which helps improve the utilization of available resources and prevent unexpected resource shortages.
- Contributes to timely project delivery: Resource planning streamlines the work on projects, reduces bottlenecks and delays, which, in turn, ensures timely delivery and improves overall performance.
Let’s now consider the resource planning steps in detail.
Read more: 4 Tips on Efficient Resource Allocation in a Multi-Project Environment
How to Plan Resources for Multiple Projects: 7 Steps
The steps below will help you develop an effective resource planning process.
Step 1. Define project requirements and scope.
First of all, you should clearly understand the requirements of every project—what is expected to be delivered and when? For this reason, you need to determine each project’s deliverables, timelines and deadlines, and estimated effort required to complete the deliverables. This information will provide managers with an idea of what resources are required, with what skills, and when.
Read more: Eating an Elephant One Bite At a Time: What Are Deliverables in Project Management?
Step 2. Gain visibility of available resources.
It’s a good idea to have a database with the information on all resources available in your organization: e.g., employees, their skills, capacity, availability, experience, involvement in similar projects, location, etc. This will significantly simplify resource allocation. As a rule, this resource inventory is available in resource management tools. More advanced solutions can use this information to make resource allocation suggestions.
Step 3. Compare resource demand with available capacity.
This stage is also known as resource capacity planning, which will tell you whether you can meet the demand with available resources. It involves mapping the resource demand with capacity and identifying gaps and overlaps. Bridging these gaps as well as managing resource capacity in a multi-project environment ensures smooth project flow and prevents resource shortages.
Step 4. Prioritize projects.
Projects can differ in terms of their business value, urgency, strategic alignment, and other parameters. So, when resources are limited, project prioritization is the key not only to effective resource planning but to achieving desired business outcomes.
Read more: Setting Priorities in a Multi-Project Environment: What You Need to Know
Step 5. Allocate resources.
When project priorities are set, you can start allocating resources. Assign them based on skills, availability, capacity, and other essential parameters. Also, pay attention to people’s workloads to prevent imbalanced workload distribution—overload and idleness. These factors can significantly hamper productivity and affect resource efficiency for other projects.
Step 6. Identify resource conflicts.
Managing resource conflicts is an indispensable part of resource management in a multi-project environment. So, when planning and allocating resources across multiple projects, you’re likely to face situations when the same resources are required for different projects at the same time. You can use scenario planning software to find ways to address resource conflicts. Other strategies of overcoming this difficulty include: rescheduling projects, reallocating resources, hiring more contractors, training team members, etc.
Step 7. Document the resource plan.
Finally, you should document the results of the resource planning process and get stakeholders’ approval. This centralized plan should serve as a single source of truth for all stakeholders and support seamless collaboration across departments.
Planning and managing resources across multiple projects can sometimes be easier said than done. Let’s take a look at the typical challenges of resource planning in a multi-project environment.
Challenges in Resource Planning for Multiple Projects
A multi-project environment is a complex system of interdependent activities. What makes its management most difficult is dependencies between projects: they can share human, material, and financial resources, have overlapping activities and due dates. In addition, a multi-project setting involves dealing with a huge amount of data which has to be stored, managed, and properly interpreted to achieve the intended results. Let’s review typical problems of multi-project resource planning in more detail.
Staffing concurrent projects
A lack of resources is a common challenge when you need to staff projects in a multi-project setting. In a great number of cases, it is caused by the specificity of the multi-project landscape and management mistakes. They include the following factors.
- Wrong priorities: You can’t manage multiple projects and their resources efficiently without prioritization. When allocating resources to projects, you need to know which of the initiatives require critical employees first and foremost.
- Resource conflicts: When multiple projects are running in parallel, resource conflicts can become a real challenge. One employee can be required for several initiatives at the same time, which is a direct consequence of resource dependencies between projects.
- Poor resource capacity planning: Before starting a new project, a resource manager should have an idea of resource demand for this project (how much capacity and what competences are required), compare it to available employees’ competences and capacity, and find ways to bridge them. Otherwise, it will result in last-minute hiring which actually won’t solve the problem immediately—it takes time before a newcomer can deliver the required output.
Assigning the right resources to the right tasks
To ensure efficient work on projects, you should assign employees to tasks that correspond to their competence levels. However, it can become a challenge for the following reasons.
- A lack of skilled employees: Some industries (aerospace and defense, automotive, telecommunications, and others that deal with innovations and technology) require a digital workforce to staff their projects. But at the moment, the competition for tech-savvy employees is very high, which makes it difficult to find them and as quickly as needed.
- Office politics: Among other things, this phenomenon can affect resource allocation decisions, when resources are assigned to a project that addresses the needs of influential stakeholders with no regard to its dependencies with other initiatives.
Poor visibility of resource-related data
By resource visibility, we mean the insight into the essential data used in the resource planning process—people’s competences, capacity, availability, workload, and output. In a multi-project environment with numerous employees and activities, resource-related data visibility is crucial. And what is even more important is that there should be a single source of truth for a project and resource manager, the project team, and stakeholders. Inability to see the big picture of resource-related processes and siloed data make multi-project resource management incredibly challenging and ineffective.
Uneven workload distribution
When there are multiple projects in the pipeline, it’s extremely difficult to staff each of them with the necessary employees and at the same time keep their workloads balanced. As a rule, you have a limited number of resources and a great number of tasks to complete. In addition, most of the resources have already been booked by other projects. In this case, it’s very easy to overwhelm them with work, which is the most unfavorable scenario: overloaded people are not only inefficient, but can also hamper the work of their colleagues and the whole project environment.
There can be another problem. Sometimes, the workload can be distributed unevenly: while some team members are snowed under, the others are idle, which significantly reduces overall productivity. The main cause for uneven workload distribution is a lack of correct prioritization and a discrepancy between people’s capacity and load.
If you notice that your resources don’t deliver the desired output or show any signs of poor performance, it’s time to check the following things:
- Have you identified project priorities correctly?
- Have you allocated resources with regard to project priorities?
- Do the employees’ tasks correspond to their competence levels?
- Is the team members’ workload distributed according to their capacity? Aren’t they overloaded or idle?
Spotting the trouble area will become the first step in fixing the issues. But most likely, you’ll require the assistance of the right resource management solution—it will provide you with accurate data, automate some resource management processes, and contribute to more effective resource management. Let’s examine how a resource management solution’s functionality helps cope with resource planning problems.
Resource Planning for Multiple Projects: Tips for Success with Epicflow
We’ll illustrate how an RM tool helps resource managers resolve the challenges with the example of Epicflow. It’s a resource management solution that has been designed for work in a multi-project setting, so it’s focused on the specificity of managing multiple concurrent projects and their shared resources.
What solutions does Epicflow offer to support resource planning in a multi-project environment?
Set the right priorities
Lack of prioritization can turn your project environment into chaos. When it comes to managing resources shared by multiple projects, clear and correct priorities are what you need first and foremost. Thanks to Epicflow’s prioritization capabilities, both project and resource managers know what projects require the most of their management attention – they are marked with corresponding colors in the Pipeline. In addition, priorities are calculated for all tasks of the project environment based on dependencies between projects, which tells every project participant what tasks they should complete first and foremost. If you manage a project portfolio, you can assign a business value to every project in the Pipeline, and Epicflow will prioritize them accordingly for your convenience. Prioritization helps all project participants navigate the flow of activities and focus on what really matters for the moment.
Get 360° view of resource-related data and processes
As we’ve mentioned previously, efficient resource management requires a centralized system that provides visibility into all resource-related data and processes. Epicflow gives insight into the following information.
- Each resource’s competences and their levels, capacity, availability, and attributes.
The system takes into account employees’ absences, holidays, etc., so a project/resource manager can be sure that availability data is relevant. You can also add essential attributes to the system: e.g., employees’ location. In addition, Epicflow has a resource allocation advisor that suggests employees for completing a task based on the above-mentioned information or historical data. In such a way, Epicflow addresses the challenge of assigning the right resources in a multi-project setting.
- Resource performance data.
Analyzing resource performance data allows resource managers to assess the efficiency of their efforts and timely detect bottlenecks before they cause problems to the workflow. It’s especially relevant for a multi-project environment, where a problem with one task can negatively affect the whole portfolio due to project dependencies. Epicflow has several features for tracking resource performance. For example, the Historical Load Graph shows the resource groups’ output in relation to their capacity, which makes it possible to assess resources’ work efficiency as well as to find bottlenecks and their causes. The Load Analysis feature can show what tasks and projects are overloading your people so that you can take timely measures to prevent them from excessive workload.
Read more: Improving Multi-Project Resource Management: Workload Analysis and Bottleneck Elimination Features
Forecast for improved decision-making
Oftentimes, resource managers have to make their decisions under conditions of uncertainty: e.g., how many employees they require to staff an upcoming project or how to resolve resource bottlenecks. Epicflow helps them cope with this uncertainty thanks to its forecasting capabilities. For example, its Future Load Graph can predict improper workload: you can see which of the resource groups is going to be overloaded or idle and take timely actions to avoid bottlenecks.
Epicflow’s What-if Analysis feature can help find the most reasonable solution to a problem. Let’s say you’ve detected an overloaded resource group and have to decide on the best way to resolve this bottleneck. You can do this in the simulated environment of the What-if Analysis mode: it will show you the consequences of reassigning resources, adding more employees, moving milestones, or other decisions so that you can choose the most reasonable one.
Epicflow’s project portfolio management tools can forecast the proportion of projects that are going to be delivered on time in relation to the total number of projects based on their current statuses. If you see that a significant number of projects are going to be delayed, you can adjust the situation by putting off the start of lower-priority projects — this will free your resources’ capacity so that you can assign them to the highest-priority projects and complete them on time. And Epicflow’s Project Staggering feature can assist by calculating the start dates of the postponed lower-priority projects.
These are just a couple of examples of Epicflow’s resource management functionality. Feel free to contact our experts to explore Epicflow features in action and learn how they can help you drive the efficiency of your resource management processes.
Conclusions
Effective resource planning across multiple projects is a critical success factor for organizations managing complex portfolios or multi-project environments. Understanding your resource availability, setting clear priorities, aligning capacity with demand, and leveraging the right resource planning tools will allow you to ensure that your teams stay productive and projects are delivered on time. Whether you’re a project manager, a resource planner, or part of a PMO, effective resource planning allows you to utilize resources most efficiently, reduce bottlenecks, and increase project performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is resource planning?
Resource planning in project management is the process of identifying and allocating resources required for project completion. These resources can be both human and material. Effective resource planning ensures proper staffing of current and future projects and makes sure that the right people work on the right projects at the right time.
What are the stages of resource planning?
The process of resource planning for multiple projects involves the following stages: identifying project requirements and resource needs, comparing resource demand with available capacity, prioritizing projects, allocating resources, resolving resource conflicts, if any, creating a resource plan, and tracking resource utilization.
What are the challenges of resource planning for multiple projects?
The main challenges of resource planning across multiple projects stem from limited resources and dependencies between projects. They involve staffing concurrent projects that require the same resources, poor visibility of resource data, assigning the right resources to tasks, and poor workload distribution resulting in overload or idleness.