Expert Insights
Why your resource plan can’t keep up with your priorities (and what to do about it)
By Brandon Thornton, Chief RPM Consultant at Milestone Consulting Group
Brandon Thornton is the co-creator of RPM, the Resource Alignment Platform, and the Chief RPM Consultant at Milestone Consulting Group. He’s spent decades helping Fortune 100 organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries align their people to their most important work.
_______________
I see a lot of organizations putting enormous effort into trying to perfect their resource plans, only to find those plans don’t actually work. They’re outdated before they’re even completed, and they’re too bulky to respond quickly to changing business needs.
This problem is pretty universal, and everyone is frustrated by it, including lifelong resource management professionals. Perhaps you can relate.
So what’s the issue here?
The linear approach isn’t working.
The problem is traditional resource management treats planning as if it has a step-by-step process and a final destination. You perfect and graduate from each phase of the process before you even think about assigning resources. It basically requires a PhD in planning and a complete understanding of everything about your organization, just to start the work.
But in the real world, staffing decisions don’t wait 18 months for the perfect planning model, and by the time a model like that is “perfect”, it’s also obsolete.
The long-runway approach can’t keep pace with the ever-changing list of projects any large, dynamic organization is going to have.
And it can’t support leadership’s need to adjust plans when priorities shift on the fly.
By the time that model is “perfect”, it’s also obsolete.
Planning must be an agile, ongoing practice.
Software teams figured out years ago that you can’t specify everything up front and expect the plan to hold. Agile works because you do a little, learn, and adjust.
Resource planning deserves the same shift—we can’t keep pretending it’s even possible to land on an accurate “final” count of all of our resources, skills, and projects. Each of those things is shifting every day, and we can’t hold up the work while we try to get things just right.
To be effective, resource planning needs to be treated as a practice, one that’s repeated again and again.
How would that look?
For starters, an agile style of resource planning means working within a realistic window of time, based on what’s currently doable for your organization.
If you can only plan as far ahead as tomorrow, start there. If you can plan a week out at a time with meaningful reliability, do that. Eventually you can earn the right to plan 6 quarters ahead, but only when you’re continuously improving your planning process and seeing reliable accuracy that far out.
Plan by roles, then refine with skills
Another shift is how you think about skills.
Cataloging every person’s skills is incredibly cumbersome, and it’s rarely accurate. People inevitably have skills that never got tracked. Worse, a skills inventory can’t tell you whether the right people are available for the work that matters most right now.
A more practical approach is to plan around the general roles you need. A role is shorthand for a set of skills. For example, a manufacturing engineer generally designs production processes, sets up and qualifies equipment, and troubleshoots issues on the line. A process engineer, quality engineer, or industrial engineer might each be able to fill that role, and one person might fill several roles.
Compare the roles your priority projects need with the people available to fill them, and you’ll quickly see where demand exceeds capacity. Detailed skills, experience, and location still matter. You bring them in when a specific staffing decision calls for that precision.
The critical under-layer: Communication
Here’s the important thing to know: None of this works without a lot of communication. A lot.
Executives need to be communicating with project and portfolio leaders about what their priorities are. Project managers need to be checking in with functional leaders so they can understand who’s actually available. And the people doing the work need to be communicating with functional leaders about all the things demanding their time—beyond the official, named projects—so there’s a clear understanding of their true availability.
But… how?
I don’t find many people who disagree with the theory here. What I do hear, though, is lots of questions and concerns.
- We’ve got thousands of resources and hundreds of projects—how can we possibly know who has capacity for what in real time?
- How can we begin to facilitate and maintain that level of communication?
- How does one actually stay aligned with leadership’s priorities day to day?
- How could we ever shift plans like this, on a dime? Our systems aren’t built for that.
Those are exactly the right questions.
Years back, our team at Milestone was asking these same questions on behalf of our clients, and it became clear the tools out there weren’t built for this way of working.
So we built the tools ourselves.
We developed RPM to help the world’s leading organizations plan their resources in real time. We designed it to be a combination of both software and processes, because you can’t transform your resource planning without both.
The shift from traditional resource planning to more agile resource planning is the foundation of RPM—but, really, it’s just the beginning. If you’re curious to hear more, watch for my upcoming posts. And I’m always here if you want to chat.
