It is impossible to implement a project without resources. Resources can be your own or rented. Either way, they are needed to achieve the intended result.
The use of resources needs to be planned, otherwise the project will not work as intended and the outcome will not be achieved.
There are different types of resource planning. The type of project you are working on will affect the way you plan. How long will it take? How big is it? What is the end result of the project? In any case, resources need to be allocated in some way to the project before it starts. Planning what resources are needed, how much and when they are needed is necessary.
Resource management is different in a large investment project compared to a product development project. In large investment projects, most resources are typically allocated to the project for a longer period of time, whereas in product development projects, a person may be involved in several projects at the same time for short periods of time. Consequently, planning methods may differ. In investment projects, workloads are planned and the remaining workload is estimated using tasks and their workloads, whereas in a product development project, workloads can be difficult to estimate and reservations are made at project level for a period of time.
The project manager has written a few times about resource management in the project. For more information on resource management, its implications and how to do it, see the following articles by the Project Manager:
Resource-or-capacity management?
Systematic resource management
For an organisation to learn from what it does, any planning exercise needs a feedback loop to the outcomes, i.e. a measure of how the plan held up against the implementation. Time and attendance serves well in this role as a resource planning tool. By linking timesheet data to resource management reservations or planned workloads for tasks, a sufficient link between plan and execution can be established over time.
Comparison of resource reservations and hours worked
Although the projects are unique by definition, similarities can be found in their structure and stratification. Using these similarities and their relationships, the total workload of a new project can be estimated when a component can be estimated with reasonable confidence.
Here is an example of an IT project for clarification. By collecting the hours worked throughout a project and classifying them, for example, as: design of activities, implementation, testing and administrative hours, the total workload of the next corresponding project can be reasonably well estimated, if, for example, the workload related to implementation can be estimated. This estimate is based on a ratio of different types of work calculated from historical data, where, for example, implementation typically represents 40% of the workload, planning 20%, testing 30% and administrative work 10%. The ratios will become more precise when data from several projects of the same type are available.
Hourly logging time is not just about money
A relic of a world gone by or a functional control device?
The benefits of recording hours worked are best achieved when it is part of a project and resource management information system, where plans are linked to actual data.
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