Who is on my team, and what are they working on?

If you’re new to being a manager or new to wanting to improve how you manage, I would recommend you start where I did and answer this question: Who is working on what project?

Start with list of projects and a list of people available to work those projects.

Then establish a simple relationship between those two ideas over time. 

We call this Project Allocation. 

After loading in your projects (name and start/end date) and personnel info (their name), you enter allocation information into the system for a project via a simple table - with time across the top and resources down the side. For each month, for each person, input how much of their time (a decimal between 0 and 1) they dedicate to this project.

Repeat this activity for all your active projects. 

If it feels like a heavy lift at first, I get it. The tool is not useful until your data brings it to life. Here’s my promise: make the initial investment and you won’t know how you lived without it later. Or to it with just two or three projects to start with. I’m confident you’ll see the value.

Pain: Most organizations and managers have a spreadsheet that does many of these same things. I also lived in that spreadsheet hell prior to building this. By hand maintaining that spreadsheets became yet another task - I need less work to do, not more. 

Let’s take a step back for context - in the organization level view, you’ll now see the total “load" on your “shop” over time. I hope it’s a soft slope and not a plateau with a cliff. If your organization is healthy, you will likely immediately notice that your peak shopload is greater than the total number of people on your team. How did that happen?

Drill into the Resource Loading view. This view provides a by-resource, over time, view of your allocations. This view will immediately highlight when a resource is (under or over) booked for a given month. You can then drill into that resource, and a Resource Allocation table appears.

The Resource Allocation table still has time across the top, and projects are down the side - with each cell representing this resource’s time commitment that month of the project. This allows you, in a single view, to prioritize and level load (or purposefully overload) the resource over time.

Clicking on the project name returns you to the project views. Ease of navigation is important to us. You can continue to update allocations, add/remove resources, etc. until everything is executable… or your realize, with firm data, that you’re over/under booked as an organization.

Solving your HR needs is beyond the scope of this tool - but the tool will clearly show you when you need to call HR for help... in one way or another.

Alright, head count is important. But, can we show the financial impact to projects of these resources? Yes, that’s how my career developed, from managing heads to fiscal responsibilities. We’ll talk about budgets, plans, and estimates in the next post.