I’ve discussed in past articles how I believe and have experienced results that show that project portfolio management (PPM) is the single most essential IT governance control that can improve a tarnished image for the IT department.
PPM is a governance discipline made up of several, specialized and individual disciplines. Some the more significant individual disciplines include demand management, business case analysis, and resource management.
Out of all of them though, it is a structured and well-administered practice of resource management, properly integrated into your PPM process, which can save the day when you need to squeeze more blood from the proverbial IT stone.
Resource Optimization
Common sense will tell you if you place the skills and resources that best match the needs of a project, said project will be completed as fast as possible and with the best possible quality. Unfortunately, in the fluid business environment that IT departments must function, this “perfect” allocation of resources to projects is virtually impossible to achieve.
The next best option—and an option that is achievable—is to construct a resource management control process that endeavors to maintain an optimized resource-to-project distribution.
In simple terms, the resource management function aims to achieve two simultaneous goals: place the best available resource on a project in order to maximize the project’s potential for success, and to ensure a high-level of resource utilization to avoid unnecessary expense and a bloated IT staff.
IT Master Schedule
As a starting point, an effective resource management function requires one essential input from an earlier PPM step: a master schedule of all approved IT projects.
If you’ve built an effective IT master schedule you should be able to see all of your project demand for a predetermined window of time (i.e., rolling 18-months) in a single report.
The master schedule is the heart of the PPM process. It is the end result of the up-front work of collecting, coordinating, and evaluating new project ideas.
Following other guidelines I’ve presented to you in the past, the master schedule should organize the portfolio of projects into the major categories of non-discretionary (regulatory, legal, production support, etc.), large discretionary (strategic, informational, transactional, and infrastructure), and small discretionary (small system enhancements falling under a predetermined threshold, such as 500 IT resource hours, or $100,000 in total cost).
The master schedule shows you not only the projects currently active, but also those approved projects awaiting resources. In other words, it shows you a pipeline of the next wave of IT projects that your organization will be working on in the near future.
If constructed appropriately, each category and each project within the individual categories will have an explicit stack-ranked priority. In other words, if there are 50 projects on your master schedule you should see each project assigned a priority from one to 50.
This priority ranking is one of the essential keys to successful resource planning.