Back To Basics - Project Management (Part-IV): Project Resources Planning

In previous posts, we looked at project planning in terms of scheduling of activities, aligning project activities within project scope, cost, time and quality constraints. In this post, we are going to look at vital aspect of project planning - i.e. project resources planning: identification of required skillset and experience, staffing right resources, etc.

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Project Delivery Schedule Planning | Project Resources Planning | Project Cost Planning | Project Quality Planning | Project Risk Planning | Project Communication Planning

Project Resources Planning

It is the people who make the project work hence it is critical to do project resources planning. But project resource is not just about the people to be involved in the project, rather materials, equipment required for successful completion of the project. Having mentioned this, in services industry especially IT, professional services, consulting services,. project resources planning primarily revolves around people/staffing management.

Human Resource Plan

As mentioned above human resource planning is significant part of the project resources planning. Even before you select/procure material resources, you would need right procurement resources to carry out this job. This plan tries to answer following questions but rather precise details:

1. What kinds of people are required to complete the project necessary qty, competencies?
2. What should they do roles & responsibilities?
3. Whom will they report to?

The staffing plan in last decade has become quite important for services based companies where these companies struggle with the pool of resource in terms of their availability, utilization; especially of the scarce resource having specialized skill-set or knowledge.

For simplicity purpose, let me start calling human resource planning as project resource planning. Thus project resources planning process identifies and documents the staffing requirements skillset, roles, responsibilities and also establish the reporting structure of the project resources. It also provides the staffing plan which specifies timeline of acquisition & release of staff.

To arrive at human resource plan, project planner need to refer organization structure & figure out necessary changes and compliances required for project requirement. Companies may have following organization structure:

1. Hierarchical Organization
2. Matrix Based Organization
3. Flat organization

What can we expect from project resources planning?

Sr No	Item	Description
A	Roles & responsibilitiesThis section of the plan broadly describes how resources should be & how they are expected to perform in order to deliver the project outcome.
A.1	Role	For set of activities & work area, Roles are identified to make resource accountable e.g. business analyst to assess & process business requirements
A.2	Responsibility	This section documents clearly describes the work a project team member is expected to carry out to perform project activities
A.3	Competency	If project team does not have necessary competencies, project outcome remains uncertain. To assess competency requirement this section describes the skill set, experience & capacity requirement concerned about the completion of project activities. Based on resource competency requirements; company can undertake hiring or training activities.
A.4	Authority	Authority is what marks the difference between steering committee and working committee. This section of the document, describes who has what kind of authority to perform/approve/reject, etc. e.g authority to approve resource movement, the right/authority to approve project schedule, quality gate checklist, etc. Widely known secrete - Team members operate best when their individual levels of authority match their individual responsibilities
B	Organogram for projectThis can be formal or informal chart to indicate team members involved in the project with reporting/working relationship. It may help project sponsors to take into account organization designs already in place.
C	Staffing management planThis is an important section which if implemented can have cost implication to the organization. This section describes staffing & training requirement, resource calendars, release plan, rewards & recognitions, etc.
C.1	Resource acquisition	This section tries to answer following questions: Do we have resources of specified competencies & experience? Should we move internal resource to given project or hire new ones? If new resource is to be hired, should he be on the co. roll or contract? Will team work in a co-location or discrete places across geographies? What is the cost-benefit analysis for decisions made for above aspects? How staffing activities will be synchronized with HR department?
C.2	Resource calendars	This section talks about following points The duration of each kind of team members required for project Timeline for hiring (internal/external) – when should these be started Depicting resource requirement in calendar of the project team during the entire lifecycle of the project
C.3	Staff Training & release plan	This plan provides details of the training to be provided for project team so as to make them competent to perform project activities. These could be in house training, external trainings, and certifications as necessary for sponsors’ compliance requirements.The project resources need to be released based on project activities & progress made. This section describes the approach to be taken in releasing resources underlining the cost, quality & timeline implications.
C.5	Incentive Program	This section to document clear objectives & unambiguous conditions for nominations & reward process underlining the cost-benefit analysis.

Table 1 : Project Resources Planning

For other kind of resources such as material, equipments, etc one need to plan in similar manner i.e. grade of equipment, capabilities available, duration & schedule of availability, acquisition plan, etc. Though this is also one of the important factor in project planning, we have observed in service industry human resource planning plays a vital role within project resources planning.

What do you think of this post? Let me know your feedback & comments.

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Project Delivery Schedule Planning | Project Resources Planning | Project Cost Planning | Project Quality Planning | Project Risk Planning | Project Communication Planning

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