Situation
An Atlanta-based web integration services company is growing rapidly and needs to have a better understanding of where resources are being utilized on projects. Accurate resource availability figures are needed to:
- Determine which resources are available to assign to new project work
- Inform sales team when consultants and technicians are available to support sales calls
- Postpone commitments to new projects when current capacity is maximized and unavailable
- Determine and prioritize which skills sets need to be recruited
- Re-focus efforts and estimates based upon actual labor figures from PeopleSoft financials
Task
Implement technology systems that could track multiple resources working on multiple projects in a fast-paced project-driven environment to perform master scheduling, resource capacity planning, enterprise project management and project accounting.
Action
WiserWulff assigned a senior project management consultant who quickly identified the need to optimize the use of Microsoft Project’s multi-project and resource pool capabilities. Our consultant worked with the key functional leaders at the client site to build a common resource pool that clearly identified the capacity of each major facility. This common resource pool was used to link to the labor information in the PeopleSoft Project Accounting module to provide historical resource performance information that provided for the re-projection of both labor and cost forecast for the remainder of the project.
This approach to utilizing standard WBS and standard resource pools quickly lead to the ability to produce a consolidated master scheduled that enabled an easy approach to pointing out resource conflicts and re-working program priorities.
Results
The resulting environment has provided a number of significant benefits, including:
- Better utilization of limited resources
- Maximization of project throughput
- Higher customer satisfaction through better management of priorities
- Case of communications with senior management