Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices

Holistically balance IT supply and demand to avoid overallocation.

Analyst perspective

Restore the right accountabilities for reconciling supply and demand.

"Who gets in trouble at the organization when too many projects are approved?

We’ve just exited a period of about 20-25 years where the answer to the above question was usually “nobody.” The officers of the corporation held nobody to account for the malinvestment of resources that comes from approving too many projects or having systemically unrealistic project due dates. Boards of directors failed to hold the officers accountable for that. And shareholders failed to hold boards of directors accountable for that.

But this is shifting right under our feet. Increasingly, PMOs are being managed with the mentality previously reserved for those in the finance department. In many cases, the PMOs are now reporting to the CFO! This represents a very simple and basic reversion to the concept of fiduciary duty: somebody will be held to account for the consumption of all those hours, and somebody should be the approver of projects who created the excess demand." – Barry Cousins Senior Director of Research, PMO Practice Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• IT leaders who lack actionable evidence of a resource-supply, work-demand imbalance.
• CIOs whose departments struggle to meet service and project delivery expectations with given resources.
• Portfolio managers, PMO directors, and project managers whose portfolio and project plans suffer due to unstable resource availability.

This Research Will Help You:

• Build trustworthy resource capacity data to support service and project portfolio management.
• Develop sustainable resource management practices to help you estimate, and continually validate, your true resource capacity for services and projects.
• Identify the demands that deplete your resource capacity without creating value for IT.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• Steering committee and C-suite management who want to improve IT’s delivery of projects.
• Project sponsors that want to ensure their projects get the promised resource time by their project managers.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Ensure sufficient supply of time for projects to be successfully completed with high quality.
• Communicate the new resource management practice and get stakeholder buy-in.

Executive summary

Situation

• As CIO, you oversee a department that lacks the resource capacity to adequately meet organizational demand for new projects and services. As a result, project quality and timelines suffer, and service delivery lags.
• You need a resource management strategy to help bring balance to supply and demand in order to improve IT’s ability to deliver.

Complication

• The shift to matrix work structures has strained traditional methods of time tracking. Day-to-day demand is chaotic; staff are pulled in multiple directions by numerous people, making usable capacity data elusive.
• The executive team approves too many projects, but is not held to account for the overspend on time. Instead, the IT worker is made liable, expected to simply get things done under excessive demands.

Resolution

• Instill a culture of capacity awareness. For years, the project portfolio management (PPM) industry has helped IT departments report on demand and usage, but it has largely failed to make capacity part of the conversation. This research helps inject capacity awareness into project and service portfolio planning, enabling IT to get proactive about constraints before overallocation spirals, and project and service delivery suffers.
• Build a sustainable process. Efforts to get better at resource management often falter when you try to get too granular too quickly. Info-Tech’s approach starts at a high level, ensuring that capacity data is accurate and usable, and that IT’s process discipline is mature enough to maintain the data, before drilling down into greater levels of precision.
• Establish a capacity hub. You will ultimately need a tool to help provide ongoing resource visibility. Follow the advice in this blueprint to help with your tool selection and ensure the reporting needs of both your team and executives are met.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Take a realistic approach to resource management. New organizational realities have made traditional, rigorous resource projections impossible to maintain. Accept reality and get realistic about where IT’s time goes.
2. Make IT’s capacity perpetually transparent. The best way to ensure projects are approved and scheduled based upon the availability of the right teams and skills is to shine a light into IT’s capacity and hold decision makers to account with usable capacity reports.

The availability of staff time is rarely factored into IT project and service delivery commitments

As a result, a lot gets promised and worked on, and staff are always busy, but very little actually gets done – at least not within given timelines or to expected levels of quality.

Organizations tend to bite off more than they can chew when it comes to project and service delivery commitments involving IT resources.

While the need for businesses to make an excess of IT commitments is understandable, the impacts of systemically overallocating IT are clearly negative:

• Stakeholder relations suffer. Promises are made to the business that can’t be met by IT.
• IT delivery suffers. Project timelines and quality frequently suffer, and service support regularly lags.
• Employee engagement suffers. Anxiety and stress levels are consistently high among IT staff, while morale and engagement levels are low.

76% of organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to. (Cooper, 2014)

Almost 70% of workers feel as though they have too much work on their plates and not enough time to do it. (Reynolds, 2016)

Resource management can help to improve workloads and project results, but traditional approaches commonly fall short

Traditional approaches to resource management suffer from a fundamental misconception about the availability of time in 2017.

The concept of resource management comes from a pre-World Wide Web era, when resource and project plans could be based on a relatively stable set of assumptions.

In the old paradigm, the availability of time was fairly predictable, as was the demand for IT services, so there was value to investing time into rigorous demand forecasts and planning.

Resource projections could be based in a secure set of assumptions – i.e. 8 hour days, 40 hour weeks – and staff had the time to support detailed resource management processes that provided accurate usage data.

Old Realities

• Predictability. Change tended to be slow and deliberate, providing more stability for advanced, rigorous demand forecasts and planning.
• Fixed hierarchy. Tasks, priorities, and decisions were communicated through a fixed chain of command.
• Single-task focus. The old reality was more accommodating to sustained focus on one task at a time.

96% of organizations report problems with the accuracy of information on employee timesheets. (Dimensional, 2013)

Old reality resource forecasting inevitably falters under the weight of unpredictable demands and constant distractions

New realities are causing demands on workers’ time to be unpredictable and unrelenting, making a sustained focus on a specific task for any length of time elusive.

Part of the old resource management mythology is the idea that a person can do (for example) eight different one-hour tasks in eight hours of continuous work. This idea has gone from harmlessly mistaken to grossly unrealistic.

The predictability and focus have given way to more chaotic workplace realities. Technology is ubiquitous, and the demand for IT services is constant.

A day in IT is characterized by frequent task-switching, regular interruptions, and an influx of technology-enabled distractions.

Every 3 minutes and 5 seconds: How often the typical office worker switches tasks, either through self-directed or other-directed interruptions. (Schulte, 2015)

12 minutes, 40 seconds: The average amount of time in-between face-to-face interruptions in matrix organizations. (Anderson, 2015)

23 minutes, 15 seconds: The average amount of time it takes to become on task, productive, and focused again after an interruption. (Schulte, 2015)

759 hours: The average number of hours lost per employee annually due to distractions and interruptions. (Huth, 2015)

The validity of traditional, rigorous resource planning has long been an illusion. New realities are making the sustained focus and stable assumptions that old reality projections relied on all but impossible to maintain.

For resource management practices to be effective, they need to evolve to meet new realities

New organizational realities have exacerbated traditional approaches to time tracking, making accurate and usable resource data elusive.

The technology revolution that began in the 1990s ushered in a new paradigm in organizational structures. Matrix reporting structures, diminished supervision of knowledge workers, massive multi-tasking, and a continuous stream of information and communications from the outside world have smashed the predictability and stability of the old paradigm.

The resource management industry has largely failed to evolve. It remains stubbornly rooted in old realities, relying on calculations and rollups that become increasingly unsustainable and irrelevant in our high-autonomy staff cultures and interruption-driven work days.

New Realities

• Unpredictable. Technologies and organizational strategies change before traditional IT demand forecasts and project plans can be realized.
• Matrix management. Staff can be accountable to multiple project managers and functional managers at any given time.
• Multi-task focus. In the new reality, workers’ attentions are scattered across multiple tasks and projects at any given time.

87% of organizations report challenges with traditional methods of time tracking and reporting. (Dimensional, 2013)

40% of working time is not tracked or tracked inaccurately by staff. (actiTIME, 2016)

Poor resource management practices cost organizations dearly

While time is money, the statistics around resource visibility and utilization suggest that the vast majority of organizations don’t spend their available time all that wisely.

Research shows that ineffective resource management directly impacts an organization’s bottom line, contributing to such cost drains as the systemic late delivery of projects and increased project costs.

Despite this, the majority of organizations fail to treat staff time like the precious commodity it is.

As the results of a 2016 survey show, the top three pain points for IT and PMO leaders all revolve around a wider cultural negligence concerning staff time (Alexander, TechRepublic, 2016):

• Overcommitted resources
• Constant change that affects staff assignments
• An inability to prioritize shared resources

Top risks associated with poor resource management

Inability to complete projects on time – 52%

Inability to innovate fast enough – 39%

Increased project costs – 38%

Missed business opportunities – 34%

Dissatisfied customers or clients – 32%

12 times more waste – Organizations with poor resource management practices waste nearly 12 times more resource hours than high-performing organizations. (PMI, 2014)

The concept of fiduciary duty represents the best way to bring balance to supply and demand, and improve project outcomes

Unless someone is accountable for controlling the consumption of staff hours, too much work will get approved and committed to without evidence of sufficient resourcing.

Who is accountable for controlling the consumption of staff hours?

In many ways, no question is more important to the organization’s bottom line – and certainly, to the effectiveness of a resource management strategy.

Historically, the answer would have been the executive layer of the organization. However, in the 1990s management largely abdicated its obligation to control resources and expenditures via “employee empowerment.”

Controls on approvals became less rigid, and accountability for choosing what to do (and not do) shifted onto the shoulders of the individual worker. This creates a current paradigm where no one is accountable for the malinvestment…

…of resources that comes from approving too many projects. Instead, it’s up to individual workers to sink-or-swim, as they attempt to reconcile, day after day, seemingly infinite organizational demand with their finite supply of working hours.

If your organization has higher demand (i.e. approved project work) than supply (i.e. people’s time), your staff will be the final decision makers on what does and does NOT get worked on.

Effective time leadership distinguishes top performing senior executives

"Everything requires time… It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time." – Peter Drucker (quoted in Frank)

67% of employees surveyed believe their CEOs focus too much on decisions based in short-term financial results and not enough time on decisions that create a stable, positive workplace for staff. (2016 Edelman Trust Barometer)

Bring balance to supply and demand with realistic resource management practices

Use Info-Tech’s approach to resource management to capture an accurate view of where your time goes and achieve sustained visibility into your capacity for new projects.

Realistic project resource management starts by aligning demand with capacity, and then developing tactics to sustain alignment, even in the chaos of our fast-paced, rapidly changing, interruption-driven project environments.

This blueprint will help you develop practices to promote and maintain accurate resourcing data, while developing tactics to continually inform decision makers’ assumptions about how much capacity is realistically available for project work.

This research follows a three-phase approach to sustainable practices:

1. Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand
2. Design a Realistic Resource Management Process
3. Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

Info-Tech’s three-phase framework is structured around a practical, tactical approach to resource management. It’s not about what you put together as a one-time snapshot. It’s about what you can and will maintain every week, even during a crisis. When you stop maintaining resource management data, it’s nearly impossible to catch up and you’re usually forced to start fresh.

Info-Tech’s approach is rooted in our seven dimensions of resource management

Action the decision points across Info-Tech’s seven dimensions to ensure your resource management process is guided by realistic data and process goals.

Default project vs. non-project ratio

How much time is available for projects once non-project demands are factored in?

Reporting frequency

How often is the allocation data verified, reconciled, and reported for use?

Forecast horizon

How far into the future can you realistically predict resource supply?

Scope of allocation

To whom is time allocated?

Allocation cadence

How long is each allocation period?

Granularity of time allocation

What’s the smallest unit of time to allocate?

Granularity of work assignment

What is time allocated to?

This blueprint will help you make the right decisions for your organization across each of these dimensions to ensure your resource management practices match your current process maturity levels.

Once your framework is defined, we’ll equip you with a tactical plan to help keep supply and demand continually balanced

This blueprint will help you customize a playbook to ensure your allocations are perpetually balanced week after week, month after month.

Developing a process is one thing, sustaining it is another.

The goal of this research isn’t just to achieve a one-time balancing of workloads and expect that this will stand the test of time.

The true test of a resource management process is how well it facilitates the flow of accurate and usable data as workloads become chaotic, and fires and crises erupt.

• Info-Tech’s approach will help you develop a playbook and a “rebalancing routine” that will help ensure your allocations remain perpetually current and balanced.
• The sample routine to the right shows you an example of what this rebalancing process will look like (customizing this process is covered in Phase 3 of the blueprint).

Sample “rebalancing” routine

• Maintain a comprehensive list of the sources of demand (i.e. document the matrix).
• Catalog the demand.
• Allocate the supply.
• Forecast the capacity to your forecast horizon.
• Identify and prepare work packages or tasks for unsatisfied demand to ensure that supply can be utilized if it becomes free.
• Reconcile any imbalance by repeating steps 1-5 on update frequency, say, weekly or monthly.

Info-Tech’s method is complemented by a suite of resource management tools and templates

Each phase of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help plan your resource management strategy and sustain your process implementation.

Resource management depends on the flow of information and data from the project level up to functional managers, project managers, and beyond – CIOs, steering committees, and senior executives.

Tools are required to help plan, organize, and facilitate this flow, and each phase of this blueprint is centered around tools and templates to help you successfully support your process implementation.

Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand

Tools and Templates:

• Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator (.xlsx)
• Time Audit Workbook (.xlsx)
• Time-Tracking Survey Email Template (.docx)

Design a Realistic Resource Management Process

Tools and Templates:

• Resource Management Playbook (.docx)
• PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script (.docx)
• Portfolio Manager Lite (.xlsx)

Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

Tools and Templates:

• Process Pilot Plan Template (.docx)
• Portfolio Analyst Job Description (.docx)
• Resource Management Communications Template (.pptx)

Use Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite to support your new process without a heavy upfront investment in tools

Spreadsheets can provide a viable alternative for organizations not ready to invest in an expensive tool, or for those not getting what they need from their commercial selections.

While homegrown solutions like spreadsheets and intranet sites lack the robust functionality of commercial offerings, they have dramatically lower complexity and cost-in-use.

Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite is a sophisticated, scalable, and highly customizable spreadsheet-based solution that will get your new resource management process up and running, without a heavy upfront cost.

Kinds of PPM solutions used by Info-Tech clients

Homemade – 46%

Commercial – 33%

No Solution – 21%

(Info-Tech Research Group (2016), N=433)

Samples of Portfolio Manager Lite's output and reporting tabs

Info-Tech’s approach to resource management is part of our larger project portfolio management framework

This blueprint will help you master the art of resource management and set you up for greater success in other project portfolio management capabilities.

Resource management is one capability within Info-Tech’s larger project portfolio management (PPM) framework.

Resource visibility and capacity awareness permeates the whole of PPM, helping to ensure the right intake decisions get made, and projects are scheduled according to resource and skill availability.

Whether you have an existing PPM strategy that you are looking to optimize or you are just starting on your PPM journey, this blueprint will help you situate your resource management processes within a larger project and portfolio framework.

Info-Tech’ s PPM framework is based on extensive research and practical application, and complements industry standards such as those offered by PMI and ISACA.

Realize the value that improved resource management practices could bring to your organization

Spend your company’s HR dollars more efficiently.

Improved resource management and capacity awareness will allow your organization to improve resource utilization and increase project throughput.

CIOs, PMOs, and portfolio managers can use this blueprint to improve the alignment between supply and demand. You should be able to gauge the value through the following metrics:

Near-Term Success Metrics (6 to 12 months)

• Increased frequency of currency (i.e. more accurate and usable resource data and reports).
• Improved job satisfaction from project resources due to more even workloads.
• Better ability to schedule project start dates and estimate end dates due to recourse visibility.

Long-Term Success Metrics (12 to 24 months)

• More projects completed on time.
• Reclaimed capacity for project work.
• A reduction in resource waste and increased resource utilization on productive project work.
• Ability to track estimated vs. actual budget and work effort on projects.

In the past 12 months, Info-Tech clients have reported an average measured value rating of $550,000 from the purchase of workshops based on this research.

Info-Tech client masters resource management by shifting the focus to capacity forecasting

CASE STUDY

Industry Education

Source Info-Tech Client

Situation

• There are more than 200 people in the IT organization.
• IT is essentially a shared services environment with clients spanning multiple institutions across a wide geography.
• The PMO identified dedicated resources for resource management.

Complication

• The definition of “resource management” was constantly shifting between accounting the past (i.e. time records), the present (i.e. work assignments), and the future (i.e. long term project allocations).
• The task data set (i.e. for current work assignments) was not aligned to the historic time records or future capacity.
• It was difficult to predict or account for the spend, which exceeded 30,000 hours per month.

“We’re told we can’t say NO to projects. But this new tool set and approach allows us to give an informed WHEN.” – Senior PMO Director, Education

Resolution

• The leadership decided to forecast and communicate their resource capacity on a 3-4 month forecast horizon using Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017.
• Unallocated resource capacity was identified within certain skill sets that had previously been assessed as fully allocated. While some of the more high-visibility staff were indeed overallocated, other more junior personnel had been systemically underutilized on projects.
• The high demand for IT project resourcing was immediately placed in the context of a believable, credible expression of supply.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.