Gartner®: Update Your Approach to Resource Management for Projects and Products
Effective resource management is a challenge, with over 80% of organizations reporting their processes as ineffective. The transition to product-centric delivery creates additional challenges, with operating models shifts and new team designs merging IT and business roles. Gartner clients commonly ask how to “fit projects in” to product models or how to “manage demand from the business.”
A transition to product-centric delivery involves multiple decisions about decision rights, economic models, and team topologies. With so many moving parts, it is easy to fall back into old processes. When changing the organization design and establishing fixed product teams, effective resource management is a critical component.
Traditional resource allocation, that is, making an annual list of initiatives, creating estimation plans and allocating individuals to milestones months out from the start date, will damage the agility your organization is trying to achieve. So, how can strategic portfolio leaders responsible for enabling enterprise transformation support the transition to product-centric delivery while ensuring that resources are managed effectively?
As with all other processes in the move to product-centric delivery, resource management must be viewed differently at the organization, initiative, and team levels.
Recommendations
Strategic portfolio leaders enabling enterprise agility must:
- Prepare an adaptive resource model for projects and products to accommodate both dedicated and nondedicated resources to manage demand.
- Shift focus from capacity to utilization by fixing capacity and managing utilization.
- Provide visibility of team utilization by recording the progress of scheduled work and analyzing it against forecast velocity.
- When transitioning to product-centric delivery, organizations are struggling to update their resourcing models to accommodate the new methodologies. Failing to reconcile capacity plans with delivery schedules.
- Organizations that remain focused on maximizing their resource efforts are failing to manage both supply and demand.
- Product teams are responsible for both new development and support activities. The capacity and actual utilization of their teams cloud the resource and funding models.
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