The lesson from manufacturing: the need for resource management.

The pulse of the world is beating faster and faster and change is the mantra of today’s organizational life. Change in technology, in product development, in systems and communication, in business processes and in the way we set up organizations.

Change means many projects concurrently; often in a collaboration between different organizations (the initiator or client and one or more so called professional service organizations) specialized in this or that. And most often people are involved in several tasks in parallel within a period of time.

And how do we go about it? We treat project management as artisans and amateurs thinking that each project is one of a kind, difficult to plan and predict regarding scope, content and timing. After all, it is driven by the people. Thus we fail to be systematic about it. And we fail to look across all projects and their resources and synchronize their use in a realistic, transparent way.

Take a look at the reality and you will see that there should be room for improvement:
- Few projects meet the milestones and deadlines
- Many projects end up being cancelled or put on hold
- People are uncertain of the priorities. They see constant firefighting and crises. They feel overburdened and get stress
- We don’t seem to learn from experience.

The situation is like the situation in industry before Henry Ford, in the beginning of the previous century, set up the production lines for the famous Ford T; before standardization of components and processes; before the Sloane School of systematic pursuit of productivity.

I do believe it is about time we take advantage of the learning from the manufacturing industry and transfer it to the field of multi project management. In manufacturing you will always define the outcome (dimensions, accuracy, surface, quality etc.) in conjunction with the capability of the process equipment to be used.
And when you make your production plan you will carefully take the finite capacity of your equipment into account.

In project work we fail to see the definition of tasks and the assignment of resources as two inseparable dimensions.

We need to be more much more systematic and precise in the way we define tasks and what is needed to execute them as specified. We need to try to decompose as much as possible into standard task elements and relate that to resource skills and capacities. And when we make the plans we don’t see across all projects and control resource capacity and priorities. Again and again we fail to discover the bottlenecks before it is too late.

We need to integrate resource management and productivity thinking into project planning.

You need to know your resources in detail:
- What are their skills in relation to tasks you want them to do?
- What is their real available capacity at any given time taking vacations, working hours by weekday, other non project work they have to do?
- What are their real cost and earning potentials?
- What is their total workload from all the projects they are assigned to? Are there idle periods and bottleneck periods?
Some of you will probably think that this is futile because:
- Doing projects is more difficult than producing a toaster as projects are generally more difficult to define.
- People are humans, not machines. They get sick, need vacation, have a bad day, get confused, are undisciplined and they are innovative.
- People have many combinations of skills and work better with some than others.
- People can and often prefer to switch between several tasks in a day.

All that is true, but this is not an excuse not to work on getting better data and systematically learn from the experience.

Let’s have just a brief look at the historic background. Long ago Adam took a bite of the apple and started the quest for knowledge. With the Renaissance and the birth of natural science (Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, later Darwin and many, many others) mankind started a relentless pursuit of better and better technologies for food production, manufacture of tools, transportation and communication.

Globalization is brought about by cheap transportation and open communication. Everybody is trying to keep pace and stay in the game. This means change – on all levels and degrees of complexity. And more and more is being organized as projects.
A project is simply defined as one or more tasks which might have interdependencies. Some can run in parallel others in sequence.

The more formal project management culture and systems originated in USA in the 1950-ties with the big defense projects. The emphasis was on planning and control of the individual large project often with 1000’s of tasks defined in huge networks. Mathematical algorithms were developed finding the critical path and adjusting the timing of others tasks to that. Still today, most research and efforts to standardize project management is focused on how to run the individual project. The winners are those who manage multiple projects and their resources most effectively.