A thought leader in organizational project and resource management, Jerry is frequently cited by leading voices in the world of business, including legendary management guru Tom Peter. You may know Jerry from his book, Napoleon on Project Management: Timeless Lessons in Planning, Execution, and Leadership. This interview centered on Jerry’s latest work which is a subject matter that I have been spending a lot of time with lately, The Resource Management and Capacity Planning Handbook: A Guide to Maximizing the Value of Your Limited People Resources.
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: Doesn’t mature companies have this all down? I mean isn’t this just needed for innovation and new companiese?
Jerry Manas: It’s pretty pervasive. For instance, I’ve seen some big companies have a lot of difficulty but they can be mature in other areas. They can be mature in project management and then still struggling with resource management. There’s a benchmark study recently from a company called Appleseed Partners and I actually focused on that study in the book to a degree and it was interesting between this year and last year, they did a study each year. It was overall about a thousand people that they surveyed. A third of the companies came in at low maturity, about a third were in the middle, and a third consider themselves mature and they’ve addressed maybe at least 60% of the top issues which is good. So I would say roughly two-thirds of companies haven’t solved the issue and even though once we have, we certainly have some room for improvement.
But the study did show, it was interesting that the mature companies had five things in common it came out with and one was that holistic view I talked about of capacity and demand. Another one was they weren’t using spreadsheets or using specialized software like the Project Portfolio Management software. They have some kind of a resource management function in place to facilitate the maturity. And the last two is they were doing monthly or continuously capacity planning so you’re assessing your available capacity when you’re evaluating and prioritizing all the incoming work but not quarterly or not annually. It’s organic, it was part of the process, it was something that you at least monthly as the work’s coming in and you’re assessing do we have the capacity to do it.
The last thing and this was an interesting example, a granular capacity planning. So for instance, if you’re trying to assess your capacity, getting down to the skill and proficiency level, like for instance say I’m going to need some business analyst. Well not just a business analyst, you’re going to need somebody that understands the order of the cash process or somebody that understands SAP software and so on.
I had one case study in the book with Farmer’s Insurance and I think it was a great example that kind of sums all this up. They were doing a project review and there was a big project coming in they needed to take on but the data showed that there were no project managers available and it was credible data because it was something that they had validated over time. The data also showed that there were some business analysts that had the right skills for that project, so they started interviewing them and then found one that was willing to take on a project management career path. And so they were able to take on that work and they set a new career path for the person. Like Larry Stanton who is the PM Director at Farmers Insurance said that he really couldn’t do all that without good data and I think that’s really the key.
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