How EPM Can Help Your Organization Balance Demand and Capacity

by Kristen Huang

Many organizations struggle with the challenge of balancing the demand for a limited set of human and material resources.

Project planning without resource planning often causes pain for companies. Project managers spend hours updating and revising their schedules to properly allocate resources within plans, only to find their project behind schedule because resources on the critical path have been diverted to other, higher priority projects.

Functional managers are often equally frustrated with the lack of visibility into project schedules and demands. They are surprised to find their resources spending time on unauthorized work for projects that are not in line with company or departmental objectives.

The root cause lies with a lack of visibility into enterprise wide data. This “silo” mentality inhibits resource allocation planning at an enterprise level.  As a result, Functional Managers know what percentage of time their resources are allocated to a particular project, but have no view into what percentage of time their resources are expected on or across particular projects. Project Managers know what percentage of time resources are allocated to a project and even know how much time resources spend working on a project, but they don’t have visibility into availability for a project. Is the 25% that a critical resource has been allocated to my project realistic? Is that resource simultaneously allocated to three other projects as well, for a total of 120%?

There are three key questions that need answers:

1. How do we understand the demand for resources across our organization?

First, EPM provides for a centralized repository where 100% of a resource’s time can be captured, allowing for enterprise project planning which takes into account day-to-day operations work as well as items like vacation and sick leave. Secondly, an Enterprise Resource Pool promotes time-phased visibility into the allocation of specific resources or groups of resources at both an organization and individual level.

1. How can we forecast demand with constantly changing priorities and plans?

With plans and resources stored in a central repository, project and operations time tracking in the EPM application allows you to update schedules programmatically and report on changes to demand in real-time. As priorities change, work can be prioritized and re-scheduled in advance based on the currently forecasted demand for the same resources across the organization.

1. How do we fulfill high priority requests without overburdening our resources?

The inverse of allocation is availability. That data is now readily accessible to identify which resources are overloaded and which resources have capacity. A growing store of historical information can now be used to estimate work and resource allocation more accurately for future projects and operations work.

                

Additionally, the use of generic resources allows department managers to forecast demand for future staffing needs.

With EPM, an organization can take advantage of a central repository where forecasted demand, actual resource usage and changing project priorities work in concert with each other toward efficiently obtaining strategic corporate objectives.