Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices

Holistically balance IT supply and demand to avoid overallocation.
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Major Business Pain Points

  • As CIO, you oversee a department that lacks the resource capacity to adequately meet organizational demand for new projects and services.
  • More projects are approved by the steering committee (or equivalent) than your department realistically has the capacity for, and you and your staff have little recourse to push back. If you have a PMO – and that PMO is one of the few that provides usable resource capacity projections – that information is rarely used to make strategic approval and prioritization decisions.
  • As a result, project quality and timelines suffer, and service delivery lags. Your staff are overallocated, but you lack statistical evidence because of incomplete estimates, allocations, and very little accurate data.
Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices-Pain Points

Recommendations

Key Points

  • IT’s capacity for new project work is largely overestimated. Much of IT’s time is lost to tasks that go unregulated and untracked (e.g. operations and support work, break-fixes and other reactive work) before project work is ever approved. When projects are approved, it is done so with little insight or concern for IT’s capacity to realistically complete that work.
  • The shift to matrix work structures has strained traditional methods of time tracking. Day-to-day demand is chaotic, and staff are pulled in multiple directions by numerous people. As fast-paced, rapidly changing, interruption-driven environments become the new normal, distractions and inefficiencies interfere with productive project work and usable capacity data.
  • The executive team approves too many projects, but it is not held to account for this malinvestment of time. Instead, it’s up to individual workers to sink or swim, as they attempt to reconcile, day after day, seemingly infinite organizational demand for new services and projects with their finite supply of working hours.

Approach

Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices-Recommendations
  • Instill a culture of capacity awareness. For years, the project portfolio management (PPM) industry has helped IT departments report on demand and usage, but has largely failed to make capacity part of the conversation. This research helps inject capacity awareness into project and service portfolio planning, enabling IT to get proactive about constraints before overallocation spirals, and project and service delivery suffers.
  • Build a sustainable process. Efforts to improve resource management often falter when you try to get too granular too quickly. Info-Tech’s approach starts at a high level, ensuring that capacity data is accurate and usable, and that IT’s process discipline is mature enough to maintain the data, before drilling down into greater levels of precision.
  • Establish a capacity book of record. You will ultimately need a tool to help provide ongoing resource visibility. Follow the advice in this blueprint to help with your tool selection, and ensure you meet the reporting needs of both your team and executives.
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Methodology and Tools

Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a resource management strategy, review the methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

  • Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices – Executive Brief
  • Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices – Phases 1-3

1. Take stock of organizational supply and demand

Set the right resource management approach for your team and create a realistic estimate of your resource supply and organizational demand.

  • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 1: Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand
  • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator
  • Time Audit Workbook
  • Time-Tracking Survey Email Template

2. Design a realistic resource management process

Build a resource management process to ensure data accuracy and sustainability, and make the best tool selection to support your processes.

  • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 2: Design a Realistic Resource Management Process
  • Resource Management Playbook
  • PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script
  • Portfolio Manager Lite 2017

3. Implement sustainable resource management practices

Develop a plan to pilot your resource management processes to achieve maximum adoption, and anticipate challenges that could inhibit you from keeping supply and demand continually balanced.

  • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 3: Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices
  • Process Pilot Plan Template
  • Project Portfolio Analyst / PMO Analyst
  • Resource Management Communications Template

    All resources on this page are provided to Cyber Leadership Hub members under license from third parties including Info-Tech Research Group Inc, a global leader in providing IT research and advice.