Resource Demand Management

Services departments, such as IT often have difficulties with resource demand management. Although the annual budgeting exercise helps to forecast the loading on each team and skill set, this is no more than a best guess as to the likely workload for the coming year. Resource management software has an important role to play in managing the demand on your resources.

Apart from client originated increases in project scope, and inevitable change in project priorities, new projects will unexpectedly arrive.

For example, demands from regulatory authorities to amend internal systems can create top priority projects at short notice. They must be done if you want to stay in business!

These changes cause havoc to resource demand management by disrupting a workload that had been carefully planned around skills capacity and existing commitments.

Apart from major projects, system crashes and upgrades create demands that will also divert resource from pre-planned work. Where there is a large percentage of business as usual (BAU) work, an operation resource cannot easily be diverted to such projects without jeopardizing support levels.

Improving Resource Demand Management

Innate resource management software helps manage the resource demand by:

• Gathering details of new work as it arrives, be it rough cut estimates for major projects, plans for departmental projects, BAU tasks or holidays. Innate’s web based spreadsheets easily handle these
• Innate's resource planning spreadsheet will immediately show skills bottlenecks as they arise, for demand management meetings to resolve
• Where the workload needs to be rebalanced, What if analysis is needed. Innate's interactive Gantt chart enables bars of work to be moved in time, with the impact on skill bottlenecks immediately displayed
• As the demand management team agree on such changes, the live database can be updated and each manager shown the impact on their projects and tasks with change reports

Managing resource demand can include the identification of overloads on key individuals, such as DBAs as well as by skill. Check the Resource Allocation page for more information.

Resource demand needs to be compared with capacity, so that the workload is kept in balance. Only then is the resource allocation process worth undertaking. Innate's resource management software also provides project tracking, metrics and performance measurement.

Effectively managing resource demand ensures that commitments can be met and client satisfaction maintained. Innate resource management software supports the resource demand management process.