Resource Management Made Easy With Acuity PPM

Learn how Acuity PPM makes it easier to track and manage resource capacity.
Learn more about how Acuity PPM can help your organization with resource capacity planning: calendly.com/acuityppm/30min
You can also check out our article on Best Practices for Resource Capacity Planning: acuityppm.com/best-practices-...
One of the biggest challenges to successful strategy execution is resource management. But resource management is hard and virtually every organization struggles with it. Spreadsheets won’t do the trick, and neither will traditional PPM solutions, which are too complex for most companies. Many organizations simply need a balanced solution so it is easy to collect and maintain resource data. Acuity PPM now makes it easier to track and manage resource capacity. Our goal is to answer two fundamental questions that will help leadership make better strategic decisions:
1) When can we start new project work?
2) Can we get our existing work done on time?
It begins with a project resource plan. Acuity PPM makes it easy to quickly add project team members and build resource plans. Don’t get stuck trying to collect granular resource data. Reasonable resource estimates at the project level are good. Resource heatmaps alert Project Managers to any resource risks.
Once we collect the project resource data, we can roll it up at the portfolio level. Here we can see a heatmap of all of our teams with average team utilization month by month. From this view we can answer the question of when we can take on new project work. Teams in red indicate over-utilization. We can expand each team to see the members of the team and their own utilization. We can further expand to see their project and non-project work load.
We can also do scenario analysis to incorporate resource data from our current proposals to see the effect on our teams’ capacity. We can also evaluate resource load based on project ranking.
Acuity PPM offers multiple resource views. There you have it, resource management made easy with Acuity PPM

[@johnpaul707]

The main drawback i see in this approach is, the resource plan doesnt correlate with schedule work/data.

[@AcuityPPM]

You bring up an important point, which is "how granular of resource data do we need to successfully manage resource capacity?" In addition to the response below, I would also encourage looking at two of our articles. acuityppm.com/best-practices-for-resource-capacity-planning/ acuityppm.com/ppm-101-the-challenges-of-resource-capacity-planning/ There are different points of view on this. Based on our experience, we believe that most organizations benefit by having a higher level resource plan that corresponds to the timing and scope of the project and which is informed by the input of the people doing the work. This is the easiest to build and maintain. Other people would advocate that resource forecasts should be at a task/activity level in order to be more "accurate". Some organizations can be successful with this approach, but it not only requires advanced project management capabilities to plan the work at a detailed level, but it also assumes that leadership can (and will) make better decisions based on the more granular data. From our experience, even if project management is more mature, the extra granularity does not get used well by the governance team to make better portfolio decisions. In fact, we have seen such resource plans as a "false precision" that gives the illusion of accuracy, when in fact the resource data may not be accurate at all. Let's assume that an initial resource plan is well built and accurate, the problem then becomes with the maintenance of that resource plan. Over time, as things change, it requires a lot of work to maintain the accuracy of that plan. This is where resource capacity planning efforts fall apart. It takes a lot of extra work to maintain both a detailed schedule and detailed resource plan. For these reasons (and others), we believe that many companies can be just as successful by maintaining a higher level resource plan that is "good enough" to answer the two key questions: 1) When can we take on new project work? 2) Can we get our existing project work done?