Back To Basics – Project Management Guide: Project Resource Planning

Back To Basics – Project Management Guide: Project Resource Planning

In previous posts, we looked at project planning in terms of scheduling of activities, aligning those with project scope, cost, time and quality constraints. In this post, we are going to look at another vital aspect of project planning – i.e. resource planning.

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.

Project Resources Planning

It is the people who make the project work hence it is critical to plan for project team. But project resource is not just about the people to be involved in the project, rather materials, equipment required for successful completion of the project. Having mentioned this, generally resource planning tends to revolve about people/staffing management.

Human Resource Plan

This plan tries to answer following questions but rather precise details:

1. What kinds of people are required to complete the project – necessary qty, competencies?
2. What should they do – roles & responsibilities?
3. Whom will they report to?

Thus human resource plan identifies and document the staffing requirements – skillset, roles, responsibilities and also establish the reporting structure of the project resources. It also provides the staffing plan which specifies timeline of acquisition & release of staff.

The staffing plan in last decade has become quite important for services based companies where these companies struggle with the pool of resource in terms of their availability, utilization; especially of the scarce resource having specialized skill-set or knowledge.

To arrive at human resource plan, project planner need to refer organization structure & figure out necessary changes and compliances required for project requirement. Companies may have following organization structure:

1. Hierarchical Organization
2. Matrix Based Organization
3. Flat organization

What can we expect from human resource plan?

Table 1 : Project Human Resource Plan

For other kind of resources such as material, equipments, etc one need to plan in similar manner i.e. grade of equipment, capabilities available, duration & schedule of availability, acquisition plan, etc. Though this is also one of the important factor in project planning, we have observed in service industry human resource planning plays a vital role within resource planning.

What do you think of this post? Let me know your feedback & comments.

You can jump to Project Planning | Project Scope | Delivery Schedule Planning | Resource Planning | Cost Planning | Quality Planning | Risk Planning | Communication Planning parts of this series.

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