Simply knowing that there are enough people available to handle a project is only half the challenge, it's also equally important to make sure that they're the right people. You might have a hundred Visual Basic programmers available, but if a project requires Perl scripting expertise you're going to be up a creek. Increasingly specialised information workers aren't interchangeable; they have so many different skills, developed to so many different levels, and those skills are changing so quickly, that it's hard to keep up, much less anticipate future skills demand.
To get the whole picture, it's necessary to tie project management systems in with broader human capital management (HCM) platforms, which handle human aspects of the company such as development of individuals' skill sets. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems typically include human resources management modules, but their capabilities are usually limited to the more factual issues and stumble when confronted with intangibles such as knowledge and capability. HCM, created as extensions to the administrative features found within ERP systems, provides a more consistent view of employee training, education, skills, and other critical attributes.
"ERP was designed to make the recording of transactions very efficient, but when it comes to using information it's absolutely hopeless," says Michael Coveney, director of business services with services giant Geac. "ERP is focused on what you've done, but that isn't really an indicator of what's going to happen in the future."
These measures depend on operationally relevant information about the company's production processes and both its human and business assets. When combined with HCM capabilities, staff planning should properly be viewed with the same sort of importance given to conventional demand planning and forecasting. This will allow you to become become more proactive about your project scheduling, ensuring you know what skills are required and when -- and which people are going to be available to provide those skills.
For example, if your analysis can show that you're going to need five Linux experts for projects that will be running in 12 months' time and you will only have two available, now -- when you're committing to the project -- is a good time to start hiring or training some other people who may be free at that time. Because people are such a considerable expense for any business, better visibility of staff plans can also improve the budgeting process.
The long-term human view
Given the right management approach, project resources and staff capabilities will take their rightful place as essential elements of the business information ecosystem. But simply putting them there isn't enough -- to both allocate resources better in the future, it's also critical to implement feedback mechanisms that are able to measure project performance against defined measures of success.
You're not sure how to measure success? Then you've got a problem. "When there's a whole series of projects, you have to assign assets and, even more importantly, at the end you must be able to measure whether you did what you said you were going to do," says Coveney. "This requires breaking down strategic plans into measures of success, implementation and measures of resources for those activities."
It's not enough to just say that a particular stage of a project was completed; it may have been completed late, improperly, or by people whose skills were only a partial fit for the job at hand. Any of these issues could easily have impacted the customer's perception of the company -- potentially endangering the opportunity for follow-up work or strong references down the track.
You probably already have regular appraisal techniques for judging staff performance, but they're likely to be generic measures that are hard to apply to projects. To resolve this issue, tailor performance metrics to the requirements of a particular project, then use appropriate systems to track both individuals' performance and customer satisfaction.
Such metrics feed into the overall picture of how the business is running -- and should be reflected in high-level business performance monitoring systems that gauge the overall performance of the company. Even if a project ends up being managed sub-optimally, careful management of human capital can provide invaluable guidance for the future, ensuring that service levels are met and constant improvement remains the name of the game.
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
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