10 Resource Planning Steps For Humans
I hate “Resource Planning” and “Resource Forecasting”. Well, I hate these labels and most numbers-only approaches to these processes. They’re just un-human. For example, many are only driven by numbers and have little regard for the individuals. However, since planners use these as search keywords in Google while researching, I need to use them here to get the conversation started. Just keep in mind that human labor is not a commodity.
I prefer terms like “People Project Planning”. People are the creators and innovators, the pulse of the projects, and deliverers of great project results.
You are human. Not a machine.
The 10
This is a long post and therefore here’s the skinny on the 10 steps. Then you can click a step link or scroll down to get the details on each step, covering the why, how, and agile applicability. This list assumes your budget is limited and you don’t have the freedom to hire people to fill new roles. It also assumes you have basic project processes and some of your projects might include hybrid waterfall/agile models.
Identify hats each person brings to the table
It all starts with understanding the scope of your people’s skills and experiences. Learn their strongest assets, what roles they held in the past, and what new roles they may fit into for a future project.
Define people roles in your project process
Now that you know the hats people have worn or could wear, think about the roles your critical project tasks need while keeping in mind the available people you have.
Determine needs for dependencies
Planning helps when you have clear links between important tasks and even between projects. This will come in useful with the scheduling of dates using a tool that can manage dependencies for fast date propagation.Assign draft project target dates
Know your key project delivery dates before mapping people for planning. Focus on most important dates and hold off on detail task dates for now. These dates are only draft dates and may change to accommodate people availability.Find stars and sponges available for roles
”Stars” are the experts. “Sponges” are the less experienced, but have high potential as those who want to learn and share. They are both equally valuable for planning. Stars are in demand and may not be available, so seek out the sponges who can grow quickly.Adjust project tasks, roles, and dates
Now that you have people candidates, you may need to fudge tasks, roles, and their expected work dates to align with your limited pool of great people and their availability slots. Adjust and balance.
Obtain people consensus with initial plan
You need to get agreement to avoid later issues. Review the schedules, roles they will play, support to increase confidence levels, expectations, concerns, and then obtain agreements.Identify risks to the plans and jot down contingencies. The more you are prepared, the easier it will be to adjust to the unexpected. Common risks are people becoming ill, being switched to another project, or over committing.
Engage people and be flexible
Set expectations that change will happen during project execution and how everyone needs to be flexible. Engage people to ask for help and provide help to others before issues affect the timeline.Capture lessons learned and improve planning
People planning and forecasting is a process and in itself should be run like a project. Learn from experience and continuously make your planning process better for future projects.
Now that you have the summary, read on to get the details. It’s designed to be linear, but feel free to jump around.
The Details
Historically, “resource planning” was done by specific schedulers who had access to specialized tools that take time to learn and are complex to use. The process was done with little transparency into people experiences AND people potentials. Decisions were mostly financial-based rather than project end-result-value-based.
Today, projects are abound with new people taking on lead positions and working remotely. The power of people planning and forecasting is moving away from the responsibilities of certain individuals and becoming more team focused and transparent. This aligns with the trend that new project leads and team members are given more flexibility to make plans for their future projects while engaging in current projects. This is especially true for small to medium-sized projects. In a recent email exchange with project expert and author Dr. Harold Kerzner, he says, “For traditional or operational projects, I would agree that resource planning is heavily influenced by project leads and the team. But for strategic projects, especially those involving innovation, resource planning may be controlled by corporate governance because of the necessity for critical skills.”
Although this 10 resource planning steps for human article is mostly for those on traditional or operational projects, it can also be helpful for the corporate governance people on capital projects that want to consider the human side of resource planning, forecasting, and management.
Assumptions:
Your project budget is limited and tight.
You don’t have the freedom to hire new people to fill project roles, so you will need to work with your available people.
You have good processes for executing your projects, such as project “recipes” or templates, or you’re moving in that direction. This is important for repeatable-type projects, such as those done in consulting firms, professional services departments, new product development groups, and other areas that drive repeatable types of projects for client solutions. If you don’t have project “recipes” or project templates, think about a past project that needs to be repeated and start with its set of tasks as a framework. Otherwise, shoot-from-the-hip and build a project from scratch. Just ensure you turn it into a repeatable process for the future with lessons learned.
You’re using a tool that makes it easy to track project processes and tasks. Well, if not, you’re at least using Excel and PowerPoint, right? In that case, consider better tools.
Your project is either waterfall (sequential task lists) or a hybrid waterfall with agile/scrum approaches. For hybrid agile cases, I will note those in each step below.
You’re a human.
And now, let’s look at 10 steps for a human approach to resource planning in more detail…
1) Identify Hats each person brings to the table
Definition: Think of the term people “roles” as people titles or what hats they wear, such as business analyst, architect, product manager, user-experience designer, lab technician, project sponsor, etc.
Why: This is important to avoid wasting time defining people roles that cannot be filed. Remember that we’re assuming your people resource planning budget is finite or static. You gotta work with what you have, and what you have could be awesome.
How: Identify what roles people have played on past and current projects. Were they successful with those roles? The question about success is not about their comfort, but more about individuals being challenged and having the ability to flex, learn, and grow with that experience.
Think about a couple of words that best describe the hat someone would wear to get this work done. Have a fun half-hour workshop with your team members to figure this out with each person throwing up sticky notes on a board describing the hats they have worn. If you can’t herd the cats, then just enter in a person’s name as a placeholder for the next step below and change it later.
Agile: For your hybrid projects that have both waterfall and agile/scrum phases, consider agile roles, such as product manager, scrum master, etc. Let’s assume you don’t have enough agile experienced people to go around for all of your hybrid projects. In this case, ask those with the experience to establish some best practice steps for how to prioritize requirements for a time-blocked sprint with the agile team, facilitate daily scrums, establish continuous deployment DevOps processes, etc. These steps should be documented with enough detail to help novice agile leads get up to speed. Then when it’s time to review agile hats, new people can wear them well.
2) Define People roles in your Project process
Why: Your planning timelines are better serviced when your future project task role assignments are aligned with the your people’s skills, experience, and potential.
How: Start with key tasks that drive critical milestones. As you review each task think about its purpose and what needs to get done. Think about who has done this in the past in previous projects and note that person’s past role with this task or define a new role that best fits the work. Since you can’t wave the magic budget wand and hire new people, stick with your existing people’s experiences as identified in the step above. This takes time, but you will get faster with practice. Ask your team members and project stakeholders what expertise is needed for key tasks and label them as project hats.
Agile: For your agile part of your project, you can still define roles with the tasks to better present data for any roles-based timeline reporting you may build or have auto-populated with a project and process management tool. Although, many agile tasks are defined on the fly. If roles are not defined with these tasks, keep them in task buckets (deliverable lists), task tags, or scrum board columns. For your agile hybrid project part that’s driven by your framework or methodology list of tasks, ensure roles are well defined for future repeatable projects.
3) Determine needs for dependencies
Why: Project task dependencies will affect how work is structured across a project and how it will connect a set of individual workloads against series of dates.
How: You can skip this step if your project is super small, but give it a try. Start with a critical path with key milestone deliverables. Those are your most important set of tasks or packages of work that need to be done and delivered to someone or something for the next major phase along the way to completing your project. Link them together as dependencies so you know what tasks depend on previous tasks. Once you have critical tasks linked then link the supporting tasks.
Avoid overloading links, such as link no more than one predecessor for each task. Overkill adds confusion for us humans. If you have a project tool, linking tasks with dependencies should be easy. If using just a spreadsheet without linking options, then do your best listing them in sequential order.
Agile: You most likely will not define dependencies for your agile part of the project, such as the scrum boards. The reason is these are usually loaded with requirements on the fly and re-ordering priorities happens very frequently. Focus your dependencies links for your pre-agile and post-agile phases of your project and skip the agile part except for special tasks.
4) Assign Draft Project target dates
Why: It’s really the only way to get a timeline picture, so you gotta have dates.
How: Like defining task roles above, start with important tasks and give them end dates. Your project’s business needs may drive target delivery dates. If all you have is the date the project completion is due, then that’s your starting point. Some people work backwards and some forwards. Either way, it’s a nudging game. If you’re using a tool with dependencies, then use its date propagation capabilities. Don’t worry yet about getting exact target dates, since some may change to accommodate people availability.
Like estimating directions with a compass in the woods, you get better over time with practice. Engage your sponsors and stakeholders to provide feedback as you set the path for the dates and look for milestones that have date flexibility. Dates and their durations will most likely flex based on people’s experience and their availability if working across multiple projects.
Agile: In the agile part of a hybrid project, tasks will not get due dates until they’re identified and selected for the next sprint. Instead of task dates, focus on keeping a constant schedule for continuous deployment with whatever set of tasks you and your team decide can be completed during that sprint. This is fluid and very collaborative.
5) Find Stars and Sponges Available for roles
Why: Once you understand what people roles are needed, you need available people to fit those roles to get work done.
How: Start with identifying the “Stars”. They are individuals who have the most experience with the roles, and also are the most engaged with asking questions and helping others who need help. Your project management tool should easily point out those who have held your needed roles in the past, but your still need to understand the complete picture with producing value for the entire team. One problem with stars is they are usually in high demand and are most likely already booked or over booked. The next best people to find are those who I call “Sponges”. They are the future stars.
Sponges are people who are freshmen or juniors that have the desire to learn, not timid with asking for help, and easily accept help from others. Unless the stars are also growing their knowledge, values, and kindness, the sponges could overtake them and become your best long-term investment. The new Sponges will shine on your projects if your project tasks are well defined with best practice descriptions including lessons learned from past Stars. Review their timelines for availability gabs and project roll-offs. If it looks like someone is not available due to project assignment, look again since they may be assigned only part time.
Agile: For your agile part of a hybrid project, follow the same ideas as above and ensure you find people who can quickly adapt and thrive in a constantly changing environment.
To learn more about Stars and Sponges, see my next article Stars and Sponges for Project Teams.
6) Adjust project tasks, roles, and dates
Why: People are your most important ingredient for your projects if you intend to produce great project results. Project plans that are cemented with tasks, roles, and dates may be a recipe for disaster if you cannot adjust them to fit your limited pool of people. You will need to be flexible.
How: You may have a list of great people for your future project, but their availability is uncertain. This is a good time to be flexible with your project tasks, role assignments, and start and due dates. If your project’s final delivery date is locked-in-stone for business reasons, then at least look at some flexibility with the tasks leading up to your deliverable dates that cannot be moved. Consider moving some dates earlier and allow time gaps if that’s the best way to fit the right people who have limited and spotty availability. Your project tool should be helpful if you’re using dependencies to shift dates either earlier or later to better align with people availability.
Include your team members and candidates in the process of aligning tasks with people availability. If you’re too focused on doing everything in a silo by yourself, you may find yourself re-aligning dates and assignments and then re-doing it again later with feedback from others. Keep your process transparent and ask others to engage with your people resource planning process.
Agile: You will also need to be flexible with your targeted sprint periods for the agile part of your hybrid project. The same rules apply here even if your individual requirement tasks don’t have roles, dependencies, and dates. Look at the blocks of weeks allocated for your sprints and work with team availability based on the sprint timelines.
7) Obtain People consensus With Initial Plan
Why: Your project will be at risk of failure if some players associated with your project are not in agreement when it comes to people planning and timelines. Obtain consensus with project team candidates, project sponsors, and other stakeholders to avoid future issues.
How: Now that you have established roles, identified great people, and adjusted deliverable dates and their supporting tasks, circle back to all people involved. Start with delivery date agreements (including flexible options) from your project sponsors. Know your timeline limitations. Review with the project team candidates their potential project roles and their task timelines. Obtain their agreements and if there are any concerns with delivery dates, then balance the needs between the project sponsor’s expectations and the project candidates availability by iterating until the gaps are minimized. Ensure you have identified all other stakeholders and also obtained their consensus with the plan. Get the project sponsor onboard with the identified project people candidates and their availability to deliver on tight schedules.
Agile: Whether in the waterfall process or the agile/scrum parts of the project, the people consensus needs, as explained above, are the same.
8) Prepare “Plan B”
Why: Something unexpected can happen that could destroy your people plan, thus putting the entire project at risk of failure. A key contributor could become ill or the project budget could get cut in half. Prepare in advance for such challenges and ensure everyone can bend and adjust to changes.
How: Make a list of all possible risks with your project sponsors, stakeholders, and project team candidates. Everyone may bring different insights of possible future risks. As you all list them, ask questions that could provide answers on how to reduce the risks. Here are some examples:
Project budget could be cut which would require reducing people hours or assignments. Do you know which roles are priority and which are secondary? Which individuals would be the most important contributors you would need to keep while which ones would reduce impact if they were moved to another project?
If people are removed from the project, other people may need to pick up and could become overloaded and stressed. Can they fill in the roles and continue to contribute? What kind of ramp-up time may be needed for learning? Are your tasks descriptions detailed enough that the learning is fast and easy if someone needs to step in to get the work done?
Scope change may impact the project. Although some of this can be avoided, there’s always the possibility scope change would be approved. This may require less people or may require more people with new skills. What are the possible scope changes? Discuss this with the project sponsor and the project output stakeholders.
People could become ill, they could quit, or get pulled off and moved over to a “more important” project. The same questions should be asked. What would we do? Who would pick up the slack? Where can we find replacements?
A project sponsor decision maker may become unavailable with trips, vacations, or other priorities. Do we have a back up decision maker?
Try to obtain answers in advance as contingencies that could be turned into action. This is a team effort by all involved. To save some time, as you go through the above steps in defining roles, people, dependencies, dates, etc., keep the risk questions in your head and ask people their view of possible risks even if they give you availability.
No one has a crystal ball and can predict the future conditions of your projects, but if something goes wrong, it’s usually people related. The easiest time to identify risks is when establishing project deadlines and team candidates. When you get some commitments, ask on the spot what they think could be risks they may face.
Agile: The agile parts of a hybrid project could have risks similar to the examples above, but another set of risks could come from a misunderstanding that agile/scrum is a silo from other parts of the project that includes waterfall lists and best practice processes. There may need to be some education to show how agile approaches can work well with waterfall methods and the two sets of people can succeed together through collaboration and sharing.
9) Engage People and Be Flexible
Why: People resource planning for projects will be a continuous effort not only for future projects, but also for managing existing projects. As described in the Plan B step above, there are always risks and your teams and stakeholders need to be flexible. The best way to a flexible culture that can adapt to changes is transparency and engaged people.
How: Set the expectations with team members and stakeholders that the people timeline is fluid and will be reviewed and adjusted. It should not come as a surprise nor cause unexpected hardship when people assignments need to be shifted. If you find some team members are averse to change, find out why. A likely reason is change sucks when people feel unprepared. Therefore, give them the tools for schedule visibility, not only for their own set of tasks and deliverables, but also for the entire project team work. Engage people to ask for help and provide help to others before issues affect the timeline. Your people resource planning will flex back and forth as needed and that’s normal. However, the more support they get from you and give each other. the less chance for bad shifting. During execution, the people planning and forecasting continues for the future, so while engaging the team for their current project work, lay the path and be transparent for future project plans.
Agile: This step is the same for the agile/scrum parts of the hybrid project, but I would emphasize the importance of quick adaptation to new critical requests, shifts in requirements, and unexpected bugs. This requires training people to build confidence and learn to cope with a constantly changing environment.
10) Capture Lessons Learned and Improve Planning
Why: Some people planning needs can be complex, especially with limited budgets and limited available stars and sponges. You will stumble along the way and you will figure out solutions to those problems. If you have your people planning process well defined and easily customizable with improvements, you will stumble less, plan faster, and end up with great project results created by amazing people. Build process improvement into your people resource planning process.
How: It’s best to execute your resource planning process in a project or process tool that provides project template features. When you go through the planning steps and come up with roadblocks or new ideas to make planning smoother and more successful, jot down your notes on what happened and how to make the process better next time. Don’t wait until the end of your planning process to do this. Instead get in the habit of making live contributions to your process whether it’s in an Excel or Google sheet, PowerPoint slides, or a project and process tool like Pie.
We talked above about adding how-to descriptions to important project tasks so junior team members can learn new project roles. As project team members solve issues and offer help to their teammates, encourage the extra step of documenting their solutions into these task descriptions so the lessons learned can be made available inside project processes and their recipes for future projects. Again, sharing and documenting lessons learned should not wait until the end of the project, but rather done throughout the engagement. This approach will indeed provide better end project results and also improve the success of your people resource planning and forecasting processes.
Agile: Success factors with people planning for hybrid agile projects are similar to the above pointers on learning new roles and keeping the process fresh with ideas and lessons learned. In addition, improve your agile people planning process with ways to continuously build a culture of flexibility and adaptability for iterative sprints in a changing model. You might consider adding one repeatable step for each sprint that engages the scrum team to document lessons learned from agile planning issues and new ideas.
Free Bonus!
Resource Planning Steps Ready to Execute in Pie
We’re making the above steps available as an action steps template ready to execute in a project for your future resource planning efforts. We created them in a Pie “recipe”, which is like a ready-to-use project template. This is available for free.
You can create a resource planning project from the recipe, modify the tasks to include other steps, such as approve the plan, and then assign people, due dates, post issues and comments, and mark them done.
In the above screenshot, the user hovered over step #5 which gives a nice popup showing the how-to description of that task.
To get your free version of the 10 Resource Planning Steps in a Pie “recipe”, follow these steps:
Click here to sign up for your free Pie account.
Send an email to support@pie.me requesting a free copy of the 10 Resource Planning Steps Recipe to be added to your free account.
Kick off a resource planning project and follow the steps.
Then, chill out with some coffee and pie!
Written by: Paul Dandurand, Pie Founder
Banner photo by: Felix Rostig
Other photos in order of appearance:
Christopher Harris
Brook Anderson
Tommy Lisbon
Anastasia Petrova
Paweł Janiak
Maarten Duineveld
Priscilla Du Preez
Paul Dandurand
Kristina Wagner
Toa Heftiba