Task: Consolidate Supply |
Perform a complete and accurate assessment of capacity availability to avoid over-booking resources.
Disciplines: Product Portfolio Management Tasks Extends: Consolidate Supply
Purpose
To ensure that executives have a correct representation of true capacity to execute work to avoid the risk of over-committing the resources with large workload backlogs.
Relationships
Roles | Primary Performer: Resource Manager | Additional Performers: Production Manager Project Manager Team Leader
Inputs | Mandatory: None | Optional: Resources List
Outputs | Resources List
Main Description
Provide a complete and accurate view of true availability of resources and facilities to the portfolio executives, including identification of critical resource bottlenecks and negative, recurring trends. These key dimensions of resource consolidation are typically represented in various reports, analysis, and trends: Capacity utilization Team efficiency trends and measures Estimated work backlog Critical resource bottlenecks The main focus of this consolidation exercise revolves around human resources, but this consolidation also includes financial resources and facilities.
Steps
Determine resource availability for work
Determine the total capacity over the work pipelines per resource type, geographical location and skill levels, or any other dimension as laid out in the portfolio structures and metrics. The notion of capacity measurement includes the definition of total - as well as remaining - capacity available to perform work.
Develop portfolio trends and analysis
Analyze the components according to the required dimensions, such as resource and financial dimensions. From a resource perspective, analyze the demand for critical resources and skills to identify possible bottlenecks. From a financial perspective, analyze key financial metrics and compare to threshold values.
Generate required portfolio reports
Based on the standard formats (financial, schedule, timelines, resources, risks, etc.) pre-defined for each stakeholder group, produce the required reports and submit to stakeholders.
Key Considerations
A common challenge with balancing the portfolio (in a way that it increases the probability of meeting schedule deadlines) is a recurring under-estimation of the work in progress, which in turn leads to an over-estimation of the organization’s capacity to accept new work.
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