Ever been in an organisation where everybody is stretched to the limit?  I’m currently managing three large projects for my employer, and in each case the biggest challenge is getting the attention of and commitment from the project board and project team.  At the fortnightly progress reviews I’m met with very little evidence of real progress being made, and the comment that ‘we need to re-plan to make the timescales more realistic’.  So we go through a re-planning exercise, but guess what… progress still isn’t being made in-line with the new plans which the team themselves created!

I had a hunch that all of this was down to poor portfolio management.  To test this theory, we did a p3m3 maturity self assessment with a little help from Sue Vowler.  Sure enough, we found that while our approach to project and programme management was reasonably mature for our sector, we were way down on our portfolio management practice.

We initiated a project to implement an approach to portfolio management.  We staged the implementation, with each stage corresponding to the various elements of portfolio management.  Top of our list was resource management.  I produced a short feasibility study which outlined three possible approaches.

The first option considered was to implement some web based resource management / portfolio management software. One system that caught my eye was Verto, which has been developed jointly by Peterborough Council and TMI systems.  Unfortunately, this system didn’t have the resource management functionality I was looking for, despite being very strong on benefits realisation and having a lovely dashboard reporting system.

I looked at various other web based resource management systems, but ultimately concluded that we needed to trial a more manual process first to see whether the organisation was really ready for resource management, before making a large IT investment.

Since we already had a number of Micrsoft Project licences, it made sense to use this tool. I produced some project planning standards so that plans submitted by PMs were consistent and could easily be aggregated to give a summary view of resource requirements.

We agreed a common list of resources (e.g. HR, Finance, Legal, IT, Communications, Senior manager) which were added into a shared resource pool.  We decided to run the reporting process on a quarterly basis, and that the report would show resources ‘booked’ for the next 12 months.

We completed our first cycle in September 2010. This process has not quite confirmed my initial suspicion of too many projects, however it did identify a number of resource hotspots where demand for particular functions outstripped supply in certain months.  This led to some interesting project prioritisation discussions in the board room.

Overall, this project has had a really positive impact, delivering:

• Helicopter view for the senior leadership team of the resource requirements stemming from the portfolio of projects and programmes.
• A definitive register of live projects and programmes.
• Enhanced project management skills with many of the PM’s generating more accurate plans than before.
• Enhanced (evidence based) project and programme prioritisation, improving the deliverability of priority projects.
• Improved decision making – in this time of cuts, directors are having to decide which staff to keep, and which to let go.  The resource plan is now a key support tool for this process, enabling senior managers to identify which functions capacity must be retained in.

The next step is to bed in a robust project commissioning process which takes advantage of the new resource intelligence available.  Prior to this project, project sponsors were commissioning new projects without knowing whether the organisation was able to provide the types of resource required, to the timescales being proposed.  They can now compare project plans with the corporate resource plan to ensure that plans really are achievable, before promising politicians what will be achieved by when!