I find that monitoring project / program resources is one of the most useful exercises in program management and one that is rarely done as completely as it should be.  I say this because there are several types of resources that should be monitored and most PMs only monitor the first (or rather they document the first, instead of monitoring it, but we’ll get into that later on)

The benefit of tracking resources is obvious.  It allows you to see how many resources are required and of what type at each stage of the project.  That’s critical to getting the budget for your project and making sure that you have the right resources at the right time.

So let’s get into the details of monitoring the resources.  First, these are the categories of resources that should be monitored:

• Project Resources: These are the resources that most PMs put into their project tracking systems like MS Project and build Gantt charts for, showing the resource utilization across various stages of the project.   These resources typically include the PM, BAs, developers, architects, etc..  Basically anybody who is under the direct control of the project / program manager.
• Business Resources: These are the resources from your client / business that are critical to the success of your program / project.  They include subject matter experts, decision makers, and the people who will be involved in UAT and rollout.  One of the biggest reasons I’ve seen for projects falling behind schedule is because at critical stages of the project, the people needed to clarify requirements or make a decision aren’t available.  And they are typically not available because they are busy doing their day-job, instead of answering your questions.  I’ve found that if you can clearly lay out who you need and at exactly what stage of the project, you are much more likely to have the business project sponsor agree to dedicate their time to the project at those times and temporarily assign their regular work to other people.   In order for this to work, you have to be able to provide details about what the resource is expected to do, and why it is critical to the project.  You also have to make sure you update the tracking sheet as the project changes and let the business sponsor know about the changes.  The last thing you want to have happen is to have the business sponsor setting aside resources to help with UAT in early September when you knew in July that there was a month delay in the project and those resources won’t be needed until late September which just happens to be at the quarter end crunch time for the business.
• Other non-Project resources: These resources are the people that are not part of the business and not directly under the control of the project manager, but who are required for a dedicated piece of time in order for the project / program to be a success.  These include enterprise and data architects, system adminstrators, DBAs, etc…   I don’t include in here people who are working on other related projects that impact yours because that is covered under dependencies on those projects versus the individual resource.

Now that we know the categories to monitor, I’ve found these fields to be useful information to capture about each resource:

• Name: Sometimes you won’t know exactly which resource you need, so you can substitute job function for name temporarily.  But you should really lock down the resource and track them by name as soon as you can.
• Role: You want to put the resource’s role down, so that you can look through the list and make sure that you’ve covered all the critical roles on the project.   In fact, once you’ve built a resource tracking sheet for one project, you can use it for other projects easily by just changing the names assigned to each role.
• Organization: This is really only there to help you group the list by organization.  It’s useful for when you bring the sheet to a specific person to have a conversation about the resources you need from them.  For instance, the business or the data center.
• Location: This field is useful for grouping, but it is also useful for determing how dispersed your team is, which is a measure of the complexity in coordinating interactions among team members.
• Allocation: You’ll want to do this in a Gantt chart format preferably tracking by week what percentage of the resource’s time you’ll need for the project.

Once all of this information is gathered on a project level, you’ll need to do two things.

First, you need to roll this information up to the program level.  That will show you where there is an over utilization of central resources.  You’ll typically find this happens with business SME’s, architects, and data center resources.  Identifying this over-utilization early on helps build the argument for more resources to be allocated.

Second, you need to make sure this sheet is updated on a regular basis.  Typically the sheet is filled out at the start of the project and then never updated, or if someone is using MS Project, never reviewed.  The truth is that as the project progresses, individual tasks and milestones will move, some will be shifted earlier, others will be shifted later.  This has a major impact on when you need the resources you’ve identified, and if you aren’t tracking that impact, you won’t be able to update your project partners regarding your new requirements for their people.