Resource Management 101

The Background

Over the last couple of years, we have had many conversations with clients and prospects about the benefits of resource management in an Agile, Hybrid IT, or product development environment. For those who suggest resource management is not important when using Agile methods, there are two main arguments: First, people are assigned to teams, and teams are 100% assigned to a product, application, or value stream. Since the teams are 100% dedicated, there is no need to give the people, or the teams, a capacity or manage their demand. They are 100% loaded. Second, resource costing can be accomplished using story points, instead of hours, to divide up the labor cost and assign to the appropriate cost center.

The Resource Management Mindset

While these arguments are true in a perfect organizational situation, there are several complicating factors that need to be considered. In the Resource Management Software Guide, we identified a few of the common ones:

1. For most organizations, the work environment is not Agile-pure across all operating units. Our experience suggests most organizations execute multiple kinds of work across divisions. This means that to get a full picture, a company needs a forecast that accepts agile, traditional waterfall and sustaining work.
2. Organizational priorities tend to change, and while Agile teams may get to select which user stories they work on during a sprint, they rarely get to select the initiatives that get funded and staffed. So, whether we are using named resources or teams, a top-down resource forecast, and usually some form of scenario planning, is required to determine feasibility of initiatives in the re-prioritized roadmap. Most strategy execution practices, even with value streams, require some top-down planning.
3. The assumption that team composition and the workforce will be stable from quarter-to-quarter is hard to defend. Employees are jumping between companies, and between roles within companies more than ever. Those changes affect team capacity and velocity. Understanding the impact of the changes and the replacement options are significantly easier with resource capacity management and resource utilization software functions.
4. Most organizations are not exempt from reporting capital vs. expense for labor, cross charging against individual cost centers and, in some cases, reporting actual labor hours to comply with billing standards. All these requirements are easier to accomplish when resource & team assignments can be set to financial work categories or split between them.
5. There are always exceptions, even when all employees are 100% team based; some will inevitably get pulled into production support work, or work on an initiative that they formally were a part of as an individual. An organization should be able to assign work in either way.
6. Skilled employees are limited for most organizations and skill sets are not always fungible. When staff planning, an organization needs to understand skill-based shortfall, to understand the kind of employee to hire or contract. Without a good shortfall plan by skill, location, employee type, etc., it is hard to know where the need is.
7. Most companies charge back internally and, where appropriate, invoice clients based on hours. As a result, it is easier to track using a time-based metric, so financial reporting is accurate. Having demand and capacity numbers to compare actuals against, makes the data even more meaningful to decision-making. This process does not get in the way of using velocity to determine productivity speed.
8. Organizational utilization is never at 100%. Anyone who has ever managed people knows that. An organization should understand its true utilization, because the loss of productivity from every 5% utilization drop is staggering when measured in man months and in dollars.

Using Jira and ResourceFirst Together

Pulling together data from hybrid environments means supporting users of all related technology camps. In the Agile world, the Jira product by Atlassian is very popular for managing scrum projects, user stories and issues. ResourceFirst offers an interface application that works between the two products making the communities of both applications more productive. Here are some of the benefits of using the applications together:

1. Build one resource forecast that supports all work (agile, waterfall & sustaining).
2. Allows resource forecasts to be driven by scrum teams each sprint, but also allows top-down planning for governance & rationalization each financial period (month, quarter, year).
3. Provides portfolio level scenario planning to test the impact of constraining factor changes, including priorities, staff availability, schedules, and team composition.
4. Offers cost accounting and cost center chargeback accounting by sprint, epic, project, program, or feature.
5. View skill analysis in real-time for capacity planning and hiring strategy.
6. Track actuals to Jira user stories or via ResourceFirst time sheet.
7. Schedule interface updates from Jira at any time interval.

If you would like to learn more about Agile Resource Planning and the ResourceFirst Jira interface, please email sales@pdware.com.