Mastering Resource Planning: The Essential Guide to Building a Resource Plan

Resource planning is the strategic process of forecasting and mapping resource needs, availability, allocations, and costs to successfully execute projects. This comprehensive 4000 word guide covers the elements of effective resource planning to help project managers, resource managers, and leadership teams build robust resource plans that set up projects for on-time, on-budget success.

Why Resource Planning Matters

Resource planning allows organizations to accurately forecast resource needs, ensure adequate resource availability, optimize resource utilization, and effectively allocate the right resources to complete projects. Without proper resource capacity planning and resource allocation, projects often go over budget, fail to meet project schedules, and incur major resource constraints that negatively impact project success. A optimized resource plan is essential to meeting project requirements and achieving the triple constraints of scope, timelines, and cost.

Yet many organizations still take an ad-hoc approach to resource planning for projects. This leads to inaccurate demand forecasts, resource over allocation, skill and capacity gaps, and delays when unplanned resource conflicts emerge during project execution. Establishing a structured resource planning process addresses these pitfalls for significantly improved resource productivity, better collaboration across project teams, tighter alignment between resource demand and availability, and greater project success rates overall.

The Strategic Elements of Resource Planning

Before diving into the tactical nuts and bolts of how to build a resource plan, it's important to level-set on what effective resource planning entails. This establishes the foundation to master resource management in project management. There are four core elements that combine to create a robust resource planning framework:

Resource Demand Forecasting: The process of analyzing project requirements, work breakdown structures, and production schedules to accurately estimate the right type and quantity of resources needed to complete project tasks and deliverables. This includes mapping out fluctuating resource needs across the entire project life cycle.

Resource Availability Assessment: Cataloguing current resource availability by type and skill level to quantify existing capacity and identify potential resource constraints even before starting projects. Assessing total available supply is essential to compare with projected demand.

Resource Allocation Optimization: Assigning resource to tasks in a way the maximizes utilization and productivity given the current supply. Optimization balances spans resource constraints, costs, timelines, and skill requirements to minimize unallocated resource time.

Resource Capacity Management: Monitoring resource utilization as projects progress to identify emerging gaps or conflicts and take proactive measures to resolve issues. This involves capacity planning adjustments to meet evolving demand in order to keep projects on track.

With this strategic understanding of what effective resource planning requires, let's explore how to execute these elements through a step-by-step resource planning process.

Building a Resource Plan: The 12 Step Process

Follow this comprehensive 12 step guide to build a rock-solid resource plan from the ground up:

Step 1: Define Project Requirements, Scope, and Work Breakdown

The first step is gathering detailed project specifications to identify the complete scope of work required for successful delivery. Analyze key aspects like:

• Project Objectives: What are we aiming to achieve?

• Key Milestones and Delivery Timelines: Major phases and goals tied to dates.

• Project Tasks and Activities: The full work breakdown structure of what needs to get done.

• Key Deliverables: Tangible outcomes created for the client/customer.

• Budget and Cost Constraints: The approved budget to deliver the project.

Solid project requirements provide the foundation to identify and plan resource needs.

Step 2: Identify Resource Requirements

Next conduct a detailed analysis of the project work breakdown structure and task schedule to quantify exactly what resources will be needed to execute the delivery plan. Identify requirements across these areas:

• Human Resources: Map roles, responsibilities and skills needed like project managers, developers, designers etc.

• Equipment and Tools: Specialized equipment or hardware needed for work execution. 

• Facilities: Actual physical workspace and environments.

• Information: Data, content, insights required to complete tasks.

• Technology: Software platforms, systems, IT infrastructure.

• Materials and Supplies: Any raw materials or parts that feed production.

• Budgets and Funding: Financial resources that enable execution. 

Document comprehensively what resource types, skills and quantities will be required for each major phase and key milestone. Understanding total resourcing demand is crucial for the next planning stages.

Step 3: Assess Current Resource Landscape

With project resource requirements identified, next assess current resource availability across the pools listed above. Catalogue existing talent, tools, and capacities leveraging resource management tools wherever possible verses manual approaches. Key inputs include:

• Existing Headcount: How many resources in each role type are available.

• Resource Skills and Experience: Capabilities to match needs. 

• Resource Calendar Availability: Existing allocations across projects shown in timelines.

• Capacity Levels: Total bandwidth each resource type can support.

• Budget Availability: Funds accessible to resource project needs.

• Resource Costs: Internal costs or external market rates.

Assessment spotlights current gaps as well as overallocations. Having this landscape is essential to balancing supply and demand.

Step 4: Compare Requirements Against Availability

With project requirements and current resourcing ability both framed, map needs against availability to locate gaps and overage constraints:

• Are there enough resources in each category required?

• Do existing resources have the right skills and experience?

• What skills need to be developed or hired?

• Does availability line up with project timelines? 

• Are their conflicts with other initiatives already planned?

Finding these issues early allows for proactive planning in later steps.

Step 5: Forecast Resource Needs Over Timeline

While you now have compared total estimates of what a project requires verses ability to deliver, resource needs and allocations fluctuate greatly over any project life cycle from initiation to closure. The next key step is mapping out exactly WHAT resources will be needed and WHEN across all phases.

>> Resource Planning Through Project PhasesPhase 1 will require X developers, X designers for X weeks.
Phase 2 we'll need X testers for X weeks.Phase 3 requires X rollout resources.

Develop detailed estimates by week or month showing changing resource demand profiles. This spotlight future bottlenecks as well as valley where demand drops.

Step 6: Identify Critical Resource Gaps

Looking at resource availability constraints compared to fluctuating demand over the project life cycle, pinpoint where critical gaps emerge that threaten on-time delivery.

>> Common Resource Gap Examples:

• Not enough QA engineers in testing phases.

• Creative team overallocated in months 3-4 

• Budget shortfall to hire supporting analysts as needed in Phase 2.

Call out major gaps to address through some combination of scheduling, budget changes, scope reduction, skill development, or additional hiring.

Step 7: Develop Mitigation Plans

For each identified resource gap or constraint, develop specific plans to mitigate the issues to support on-time delivery at the require quality level.

>> Resource Constraint Mitigation Examples: 

• Delay some Phase 2 elements until additional creative capacity frees up. 

• Hire 2 temporary contractors to supplement testing team during critical test cycles.

• Reduce certain ad-hoc analytics requests to free up analysts for core project needs.

Getting early visibility into constraints enables mitigation planning to minimize impacts during execution.

Step 8: Assign Resources to Tasks

With a complete picture of requirements over time, availability capabilities, and mitigation plans for gaps, the next step is assigning specific resources to the project tasks and phases where they are needed. Key inputs for optimized assignment include:

• Skill Requirements: Matching qualified resources to task needs.

• Capacity Availability: Assigning based on free bandwidth.

• Timing and Duration: Aligning with resource calendars for full duration.

• Relationship Considerations: Leveraging effective prior connections.

• Cost Impacts: Meeting budget constraints.

The goal is having the right skilled people available at the right time to execute each activity.

Step 9: Develop Detailed Staffing Timeline

Building further on task assignments, construct a detailed staffing timeline showing what types and quantities of resources will be focused on the project over time based on current assignments.

>> Resource Staffing Timeline

Phase 1 - 5 developers, 2 project managers

Phase 2 - 10 developers, 5 testers, 1 PM

Phase 3 - 2 developers, 5 testers, 1 PM

Phase 4 - 1 PM, 2 rollout specialists

This spotlight if any phases are under or overstaffed based on workload to optimize team size over time. Shortages directly threaten deliverables. Surplus capacity wastes budget.

Step 10: Create Resource Management Cadence

With project resource planning established, execution relies on active monitoring and adaptation as needs evolve. Establish a regular management cadence involving:

• Plan Comparison: Measuring current actual resource allocation and utilization rates compared to the resource plan

• Identification of Variance and Impacts: Spotting deviations limiting objectives and quantifying the downstream impacts.

• Rebalancing and Reallocation: Reassigning resources across tasks to maximize utilization when gaps/surpluses emerge.  

• On-going Capacity Planning: Adding/reducing staffing to line up with evolving perfect demand forecasts.

Following this rhythm ensures resources remain focused highest priority work driving outcomes.

Step 11: Enable Transparency with Resource Management Tools

Managing resources manually using spreadsheet and form-based plans has too many limitations especially at enterprise scale across large portfolios. Purpose built resource management tools provide centralized access to resource demand forecasts, availability, allocations, skills, costs, capacities, and project staffing timelines for far greater transparency. Resource planning tools like Planview, Mavenlink and Projectplace create a single source of truth enabling data-driven assignments, capacity planning, and optimization.

Step 12: Measure and Report on Resource Metrics

With the above process and tools in place, capturing meaningful resource management metrics provides visibility into the health of the planning process and tracks how well supply meeting demand. Core metrics to incorporate:

• Resource Utilization Rates: Percent of total capacity currently allocated to project work. Target 75-85% for optimal flow.

• Skill Utilization: How fully key scarce skills are allocated. 

• Allocation Accuracy: Actual staffing percentages verse planned per phase.

• Staffing Variance: Counts of unplanned changes and open positions.

• Budget Burn Rates: How rapidly project funds get utilized.

Analyzing trends in these core metrics guides better resource decisions and capacity calibration.

Realizing the Benefits

Organizations that establish mature resource planning processes supported by purpose-built resource management software tools realize significant benefits including:

• More accurate project budgets and timelines based on data-driven forecasts of costs and staffing needs over time.

• Increased project success rates through optimized resource assignments and elimination of skill gaps.

• Greater resource productivity and utilization with demand-driven allocations.

• Enables organizational capacity planning adjustments to balance supply and everchanging demand.

• Higher ROI on human capital and budgets spent based on value-focused allocation aligned with priorities. 

The payoff more than justifies the effort to master strategic resource planning.

By leveraging this comprehensive guide to building effective resource management plans, project managers and resource managers can achieve mission-critical outcomes like on-target delivery dates within budget. Follow the 12 step process outlined here supported with robust management tools, and your team will be well positioned to execute smoothly without firefighting caused by preventable resource conflicts. With resource planning mastery, organizations deliver exceptional products, services and implementations that fuel growth and competitive advantage.