Resource-driven Project Management
Is it possible to bring back the effective, but largely forgotten, practice of understanding the actual work that happens on project tasks?
Once upon a time, the magical thing that many project management professionals sought was the understanding experienced project managers had about the actual work done by their project team members. This was often referred to as Resource-driven Project Management. Is anyone else noticing that this discipline seems to have been almost completely discarded?
The Concept of Resource-driven Project Management
In resource-driven project management, a specific task’s duration is defined by the work that the human resources must do to complete the task. If it is determined that the available human resources, also known as your team members, will need to take longer to do the specific task, the task duration is updated to reflect this and the project end date may even be pushed out. This is often a touchy subject because task estimation is hard to get right, and the work that must be done is often estimated by the people that must complete it. To say the least, these people may not be the best at providing precise estimates, especially when the tasks they are estimating are complex or poorly defined.
The Key to Successful Resource-Driven Project Management: Status Meetings Focused on Project Team Member Work
If you are running a small to medium size project team (either your own department or a project team), think of the last Project Status Meeting that you had. Were you able to get a real sense of your team members progress on their tasks? Were they able to focus on the tasks at hand, or did they get pulled off into other things? Were the task estimates — you know the ones that are driving your entire Project Schedule — accurate, or were they significantly under or over estimated? How busy were the team members, and how happy were they with their work?
These are all things that you can ascertain once you commit to use your team meetings — and, I suggest, many of your lower-level status meetings — to getting a true understanding of resource work. As a Project Manager a lot of what you do has to be “choreographed.“ So how do you choreograph this? Here are the steps I would suggest:
- Develop a simple report that you can use with your team. I call this a Team Forecast Sheet. In Figure 1, below, you can see an example of one. This should be filled out at least 24 hours prior to your Status or Team meeting, so that you have a chance to review it.
- When you begin the status portion of your meetings, ask for verbal updates on task progress from each team member. The verbal status format you should ask for from each team member is really very simple and conversational: “Can you give us an update on your specific project work last week, and a forecast of what you plan to accomplish over the next two weeks, including any key personal upcoming milestones.” What should then ensue (perhaps with a little of your supportive prodding) is that each team member will talk through the tasks they worked on, the tasks they didn’t make any progress on, and the unplanned tasks they got pulled into.
- What are the things you should extract out of this discussion? Is the team member actually tracking well against the key tasks and the schedule you’ve established for these tasks? If not, what is the root cause? What are the “interruptive” tasks that are injecting themselves, if any? Is there a way to gauge the productivity of the team member, particularly if the estimates were significantly off of the true level of effort of the task? Finally, is the team member actually miserable in the work they are doing on the project or possibly just miserable in general? This is actually fairly easy to uncover if you notice other tasks keep interjecting themselves and interfering with the project work, even when you’ve mitigated external distractions. The team member is truly generally miserable if they do not seem to be able to make much progress on any task (inside or outside of the project scope).
I’ve used variants of this same technique for decades, and it is always helpful; also, I’ve actually found that if it is done without a micro-management type of style, but more with a style tuned to each team member’s self discovery of how they are spending there time, it actually can bring you closer to your team, and even increase job satisfaction. This is counterintuitive, since I know most people I have spoken with about this topic believe that people hate all aspects of tracking their time. This actually turns out to be a false notion. What matters is the way we go about this exercise together as a team.
Benefits of Resource-driven Project Management and When to Apply It
The benefits of Resource-driven Project Management can be quite significant, but also vary considerably based on the type of project where the approach is applied.
The most significant benefit to a specific project will apply to projects with complex tasks often dependent on highly skilled team members, where the Level Of Effort (LOE) on each task is difficult to estimate. This scenario applies to many traditional Information Technology projects, but can apply to any project with complex tasks. In these types of projects, how well your team and you manage time spent to complete a task (also known as “work” by us project management types) can really make the difference between a successful project that stays on track (from a schedule and budget point of view) and a project that ends up getting cancelled because it is so vastly behind schedule or over-budget that stakeholders lose confidence that it will ever be successful.
On projects where task durations are well known and there is confidence that no matter who is assigned the work (within a broad skillset) the LOE and project schedule will be the same, Resource-driven Project Management may not be worth applying. Even in these cases, I believe it can benefit a team, and, in fact, if Resource-driven Project Management is applied to a team that supports a whole program or portfolio, it can be quite helpful. In this case, there is substantial value in, as a team, looking at time effectiveness and shifting team member assignments across multiple projects.
Bringing People Back Into The Project Equation
The newest project and software methods, coming into prevalence in the last ten years or so — mostly Agile methods that have moved from software projects into hybrid business/software and pure business projects — have been a factor in the loss of prominence of the Resource-driven Project Management approach, and that’s a shame, because a lot of benefits of this approach will never be able to be realized. There really is no substitute for a team that collectively understands the nature of its work and also the LOE that goes into it. This is something that Agile projects without an additional focus on Resource-driven Project Management will likely miss out on.
My hope is that as some of the newer practices get further squeezed for better and better results, there will be a possibility for the resurgence of Resource-driven Project Management.
