Drag your team into resource planning
As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.
In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together a way to capture work estimation data in a standard format from your team including the benefits to such an approach from a team management perspective. This article will describe how to use the work estimation template for more effective resource planning. I will describe a sequential approach to use the work estimation template data and build a comprehensive team resource plan.
Single Team Resource Plan – Building a Plan
In order to build a resource plan we will steal a data presentation format from Project Management called the Gantt chart. A Gantt chart provides a structured way to represent work break down structures in order to show task start and end dates plus the sequence of tasks with their associated dependencies and assigned resources among other things.
You’ve probably run across project managers on projects creating Gantt charts to a varying degree of detail and not immediately thought this charting could be useful to represent a single view of the work your team is doing. There are various tools, both commercial and open source, that can be used for creating such charts. With a the plethora of choices available to you I would strongly encourage you to leverage whatever your company standard project management tool is for Gantt chart creation. The value of using the same tool as everyone else is to produce a Gantt chart that style-wise is similar to others in your company for easy consumption by your audience. Alternatively, you could ask project managers you work with what they use. Also, feel free to search the Internet for “Gantt chart software” and explore the myriad of choices.
Determine Common Work Request and/or Project Phases
To begin, first determine the best mix of the your company’s standard project management methodology terminology for project phases (“Visio and Scope”, “Pre-Planning”, “Design”, “Development”, “Testing”, etc.) and assign each one a unique color. Below is a sample list phases I will use as an example:
Pink Planning
Purple Design
Red Development
Green Testing
Blue Deployment
Yellow Post-Deployment Support
Remember, the goal of your Gantt chart style resource plan is to easily communicate externally what your team is working on. The more similar the terminology to what everyone else uses the easier for your management and work requesters to quickly grasp what you are trying to communicate. The consistent use of colors for the various project or work request phases helps to easily and visually determine what phase a project or request is in at any given time.
Determine Unique Work Engagements
Add in any unique team work engagement model terms you see benefit in calling out. An example would be if during the formal project “Development” phase your team has a pool of people that can do user interface development as well as another pool that work on business logic component or service development. Try to use as close a naming convention as possible to what the standard project methodology uses. As an example:
Light Red Development – UI
Dark Red Development – Biz
In the case that you have people that can actually work in both groups, using my example above involving UI and Biz development, this resource reporting approach will clearly show who is working on what when. Additionally and possibly more important is the ability to conduct “what if” analysis when a higher priority request arrives. There will be more on the “what if” possibilities later in the series.
Note: One final word of caution, try to avoid creating an incredibly granular work engagement list. A very log list will make keeping the chart up to date a full time job plus it will detract from the simplicity you are striving for in reporting to external parties. Let’s face it; external parties are in a hurry. They don’t particularly need nor care to know your resource A is doing a solution approach review of resource B prior to a full team design review prior to a design committee meeting. They need to know:
- What is in flight at an extremely high level of detail.
- Impacts of a new request hitting your team.
List all Work Requests and Projects
Next, adopt a work request or project naming convention as similar as possible to the one your company uses. If requests have numbers, capture those numbers. If a project has had several name changes, use the most recent but consider indicating the previous names. Enter all the requests or projects you know your team is working on at present as well as all the possible requests or projects that you are aware of that might involve your team. This will be an on going and frequent exercise thus initial list perfection isn’t required. Over time, the list will become more and more accurate and comprehensive.
Enter all your Team Members including Yourself
Most Gantt chart creation tools have a place for entering in “resources” to be assigned to work. Make sure to enter yourself in the likely event that you will be participating materially in listed work at some point.
Enter Work Phases for all the Work Requests and Projects
Yes, now it starts to get a bit tedious. For each work request or project you entered, add the standard work phases you plan to track. You maybe tempted to enter only phases you consider important to reduce the data entry. As you become more experienced at how your resource plan is used in day-to-day resource work handling you may take shortcuts. But, if you are starting out with a new team plan, I strongly suggest to don’t cut corners just yet.
Link Your Resources to the Work they are doing
Now, for each phase entered for each work request or project, enter the resources that will be performing tasks on each of the phases for all the work requests and projects you entered. Don’t worry about start/end dates of phases nor the percentage of time spent on “concurrent” activities for the same team member just yet. I’ll offer some ideas for you to consider on the level of detail and effort you may want to expend in that area.
Review with Team
Now is a great time to have your team members check your work! Consider adding a review of this list at your next 1:1 with each of your team members. You might be a bit surprised to hear what other things your team is being pulled into beyond what you have captured. As a side benefit, you should experience an up tick in engagement from your team now that they know that you care more about what they are actually doing. Plus, they’ll see that the work estimation template exercises are actually going to be used for something beyond just mindless administrivia. By the way, if a team member reports they are working on something but they haven’t previously provided a work estimation sheet for it, now is a great time to ask them to provide one for the work they think is remaining on this unlisted work request.
Now you should have the start of a Gantt chart that captures all the request and project work your team members are working on by work phase of the request or project. You’ve also vetted your chart with your team and increased your team’s level of engagement. Look for the next article in the Single View of the Work series to complete the draft of your Gantt chart by including more data from the work estimation sheets your team is completing.