PM Trend: Resource Planning

According to recent studies and surveys, resource planning in project management is becoming more and more popular. The trend is reflected in an increased demand for professional tools for project management, on Apple products Merlin Project sets benchmarks here.

In this blog post, we'll look at important aspects of the development of enterprise-wide resource planning.

Three Levels

The three levels of enterprise-wide resource planning are divided into strategic, tactical and operational.

Strategic

The strategic level is made up of the decision maker and Project Management Office (PMO), these two oversee all new and ongoing projects, as well as all teams and their respective assignments in the projects.

Tactical

The tactical level is formed by the Team Leaders, they take care of the teams in all projects. The project managers, in turn, take care of the projects assigned to them.

Operative

The operational level is formed by the project managers and the team members. These are then assigned to the respective tasks.

Responsibility

The three levels contain the responsibilities already mentioned. These are PMO, team leader, project manager and the team members. Below is a brief overview of their responsibilities.

Project Management Office (PMO)

The PMO is increasingly taking on the coordination of resource management alongside team leaders and project managers. Together with the decision makers, this central office must proactively provide personel with the appropriate skills.

Team Leader

The team leaders take care of a good workload of the employees in the projects, hereby overloads or also unnecessary delays in the respective projects are avoided. This ensures that team members within the respective projects are continuously informed about their tasks and maintain a good overview. That ensures employee satisfaction, the respective workload can be seen in advance, providing work transparency.

For a good workload, teams need to be assigned appropriately across all ongoing and planned projects. Using the "Combine Documents" function, team leaders in Merlin Project are able to combine several projects into one main project, thus planning and monitoring the workload across the entire team.

Project Manager

Project managers provide solutions for clear goal setting and social skills. Classically, a clear goal could be defined in the past with the project assignment. Nowadays, due to the ever-increasing number of projects, the responsibility of project managers to take care of everything sufficiently increases. With Merlin Project, this challenge is mastered because the project managers, just like the team leaders, have an overview of the respective projects and they can quickly find their way around the processes and assignments in the projects.

Team Members

To ensure that everything runs smoothly, team members need to be transparent in dealing with ambiguities, lack of knowledge and deadlines. After all, the main reason for unsuccessful projects is that goals are missed or that they have not been clearly defined.

Good resource planning only works together - in the interaction between project managers, team leaders, team members and PMO. Set the stage for your projects and processes with Merlin Project. This will keep all your projects within a realistic and feasible scope. Avoid team overload, unnecessary overtime, and partial overlap of task assignments among employees from the start.