Realizing real resource management can be hard to swallow. For many organizations, just being able to visualize a current supply model in an excel spreadsheet is a god-send! Realizing Resource Capacity management is a much bigger thing, with a much bigger gain.
In this article we will lay out the phases and details to realizing resource capacity management.

Organizations are not typically ready for a big bang approach. We created Waves, Phases, Tracks,etc. to indicate incremental steps to realization.

Wave 1

• Capturing a current organizational landscape to assist with current issues and planning

Wave 2

• Creating a current view of the processes and tools
• Creating a future for resource capapcity management
• Creating a roadmap to operationalize the future

Wave 3

• Proving that the future will work
• Creating use case
• Gathering tool requirements

Mobilization and roll out will be key! They must follow every wave! They will be the catalyst to cultural adoption!

All projects have scope and this one should be no exception. However, as stated as an executive summary, might give the project more boundaries and respect. This project will need:

1. A Vision
2. Several Goals
3. Several supporting Objectives

These should be very specific to what your stakeholders believe should be the future for resource management. Every requirement that comes from the rest of this process MUST have a place in this executive summary or it is put in an out of scope bucket for later consideration. Boundaries will make you successful and ensure a successful implementation.

Now, you have mapped out a pretty good plan and are making great progress. People maybe getting a little too optimistic. It’s time to prevent all that unnecessary “fan” cleaning and plan risks and roadblocks. Develop not only the risks, but the mitigations to those as well. This proves all things were thought through and there is plan, should things not go exactly to the plan.

Some examples to look for:

1. How is your organization a change and adoption?
   Adoption will stop any good project implementation dead in its tracks. Assess your environment and survey your stakeholders. They will tell you which areas have the most to lose by not implementing. They will tell you where the support is and is not.
2. Is this a priority to your company?
   If this is not a priority to your senior or executive leaders, cultural buy in, is already at risk. Start here. 
3. Does your company experience firedrills?
   So as you are going down the path to realizing resource management, and the federal government has just decided that this mandate has priority or your company pays millions. What’s the back up plan for firedrills?
4. Are the accountable resources known?
   Have names
   How are you measuring progress?
   What metrics or ROI are you providing to prove value?
   Who will maintain this project once it is implemented?
   Who will be keeping the lights on?

Okay, so let’s get into planning!

We will provide an approach for each wave. This will communicate “how” we plan to achieve the objectives of this particular initiative.

Wave 1 Planning Approach might look something like this:

• Develop a baseline of your current capacity and maybe demand, if you know it. Recognize here, that you will be making a ton of assumptions, so make sure that they are documented. One major assumption is that there is a financial target and there is a strategy!
• Identify your resource gaps and constraints. This will be that current capacity versus the demand.
• Propose resource changes. What is the current company vision and are our resources staffed correctly?

Wave 2 Approach may look like this:

• Current environment assessment. Identify what the current state demand and capacity looks like. Do this with interviews and workshops so that your stakeholders are very involved.
• Define what capabilities your users want in the future. Once these are identified, you will realize a Porsche has just been designed. Get yuor stakeholders to prioritize this list. The core team has veto power! Identify gaps in current state maturity.
• Develop a roadmap to achieve realization
• Develop your resource environment. This is tagging your resources to roles, cost centers, applications, some common lists of identifiers that will used to identify your resources and allow you to place demand and view capacity by another indicator other than “name.”

Wave 3 Approach may look like this:

• Identify a small group where resource contention is an issue.
• Gather the data from this group and build a model to use that is agnostic.
• Gather Tool requirements

As a summary, guiding principles drive the goals and objectives and create a collection of future state requirements. A gap analysis, prioritization and ranking will follow and lay the ground-work for the roadmap. All of this develops the companies future!

We will follow up this discussion with realized improvements and the actual defined process. Good luck with your own adventure into realizing Real Organizational Capacity Management!

Following an integrated process where the strategy and budget precede the lifecycle of project work, organizations and managers find solace in the operating model.  What is slowly realized is, that while everything is flowing smoothly, there are recognizable gaps at a much higher level.  Lower level impacts are usually hidden by managers who are simply surviving, using whatever archaic method to maintain independence and freedom from corporate intervention.  What is this gap?  Where are my people, who are my people and why can’t I deliver on my corporate strategies?

It is very common NOT to attempt to resolve every issue at one time.  Biting off more than you can chew will ruin just about every attempt to obtain cultural adoption.  Slowly gaining ground on perfection, allows the organization and company to actually REACH perfection.

So, to tackle the organizational gap we must first define a process at a very high level that will drive your direction.  This is something that your organization at all levels will understand.  In terminology that your company uses, define the various stages of planning. 

Here is the process you can use to define your organizational capacity gap:

1. Concept
2. Identified
3. Demand
4. Fully Defined
5. Fully Refined

Then identify the planning process that has actually been perfected, rolled out and is currently in use and hopefully adopted. Usually this looks like; 3-5 year forecasting-Annual planning-Governance-SDLC.

With these defined, line up where the organizational needs are. Be sensitive to the audience for each stage. For example, named resources are not required while conceptualizing the future for your company. Something like roles or FTE’s may be more appropriate. Determine where named resources are actually required.

Output from each planning stage should also be defined. This will provide purpose, focus and goals for this roll out.

It is important to realize that each stage has a specific audience with very different needs. Given this, separate your high level [organizational view] and lower level [named resources] into at least 2 process areas:

• Organizational Planning – aligning organizational availability to the business priorities based on the scheduled need.
• Capacity Analysis – Determining if we have adequate resource availability with the right knowledge at the right time to complete the organizations future objectives.
• Resource Management – identifying and managing the actual people who accomplish the company’s goals

These definitions assist in identifying the roles in each. At Organizational Planning for instance, you will typically see CIO’s here and their business counterparts.  Capacity Analysis is typically portfolio owners. Resource Management is self explanatory.

Capturing the current pain points and drivers from each of these groups will keep your information organized and complete. Digging into the details, therein, will narrow the gap between what the true needs of the company are.

Many companies have realized six sigma and CMM functions. In this case, simple SIPOCs for the high level and low levels will help to identify all areas that are impacted and the processes improvements that have to take place and the role that need to be changed or defined. This is a good process for any company, even if you are not CMM Level 4!

The leg worked involved in just kicking off this program is a project in and of itself. Too many companies skip this part entirely due to the administration and cost involved. We have learned that this was the key to solidifying adoption and organizational change. We were completely lined up with our people and the real needs!

In the next article we will discuss and lay out what the rest of the plan looks like. We will walk through the Tracks and phases, the successes and lessons learned. I’m excited to share this with you because it can make you the hero at your company!