For the imaginary company behind the case there are 500 people providing professional services. Our example organisation has multiple departments which contain several different teams. However, most of the roles and responsibilities presented are applicable to other types of businesses as well.
The roles that are presented in the basic model of a resourcing process are: project manager, sales manager, team manager, department director and controller. All are essentially included in the resource management process.
At the top of the process description are the sales managers and project managers who are setting up new projects and making resourcing requests for the projects. They are followed by the team managers assigning people to the project teams, and managing the resourcing situations in the resource management meetings. Reporting hours is a task for each person in the organisation. Many others in the organisation, such as executive team members, department directors and controllers, are monitoring the resourcing process which relies on the allocations and actual results. Whenever there are changes, the project managers are updating the plans and the process goes through a new iteration.
One essential part of the resourcing process is resource management meetings. Depending on the size of the organisation, there could be one single resource management meeting for the entire company. In case of a larger organisation, the meetings can be held on a department level as well. The main purpose of the resource management meetings is to check possible conflicts in the resourcing plan. A conflict can be for example a situation where several project managers need the same person in their project teams. The resourcing meeting should be the place where the final decision in conflict situations is made.
Depending on the nature of the organisation, the frequency of the resource management meetings can vary from one to three times a month. The sales organisation should also give input to the resource management meetings, for example if there are some prospective large projects. When the project organisation knows about potential large opportunities early enough, it can prepare itself better for the possible changes. Usually the basic agenda includes: checking projects with pending allocations, people with not enough or too much work, and reporting to the executive group. This all (amongst other things) can be done in Silverbucket. Below is an example of a list of people whose work situation is overloaded (filtered by next upcoming 8 weeks).
Read more about the great features of our resource management software.
