From the course: Project Management Simplified

Resource planning for one project

From the course: Project Management Simplified

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Resource planning for one project

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- Step seven is where we think about resources, mainly people. One of the biggest reasons why projects run late is that we find we don't have enough people when we need them. So we really do need to know how many people we're going to need when and well in advance. So let's look at how we can easily do this. When we make the post-it note diagram, we are assuming infinite capacity. The post-its show the ideal running order of the tasks, and they assume that as soon as we've done one task, we can move onto the next, with various things going on in parallel, without even thinking about how many people we might need. Basically, we ignore the issue of resourcing when we're doing the post-its, because one thing at a time. It's hard enough to think about which tasks need to come before and after which. But actually, in real life, we are always limited for the number of people we can have. Because people are usually our biggest cost. And the Gannt chart is where we bring in this extra constraint. It's a great way to work out how many people we will need at any one time. In fact, it's the only way to know how many people we'll need in the future. Because we have to see the overlap of all the tasks we're doing. You can see on this example here that around week 10, I'm planning to do three things at the same time. And again, around week 30. Can I do three tasks at once? Well, I can decide that by putting numbers along the bars and then adding them up to see if the total exceeds my available resources. Now this might be just my hours, or the hours of my team. And if I can't do all three tasks at once, I have three options. The first one is to move the floating tasks sideways, either forwards or backwards so that they don't all hit me at the same time. This is certainly a good option for the week 30 collision in my diagram. The second option is to get more resources, just for this temporary period when I'm going to be busy. And the good thing is that I know well in advance when it's going to be. The third option which is a bit of a last resort, is to break my critical path in order to get the tasks done. I have to take a break from the critical path while I do the floating tasks. But breaking the critical path is pretty bad because now the whole project is going to take longer. And if time is my key driver, it's a very bad option. But sometimes it's the only one we have since we just don't have any more resources available. So that's how we bring resources into our project plan. We draw the Gannt chart and then we change it a bit, updating it to take account of the availability or not of our resources.

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