Reality Check: Organizational Capacity Part 2

Posted by PM Majik

October 27, 2008

This “Reality Check” article follows our previous post on Organizational Capacity.

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:

A Vision
Several Goals
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:

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.
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.
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?
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!

Organizational Utilization