Guide to Leveraging Skills in Your Resource Planning

Most businesses approach resource planning one of two ways:

• Top-down approach: This involves using Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) to drive your portfolio and projects that need to be planned. With SPM, your leadership creates a strategy for the entire business and builds the supporting projects, products, roadmaps and plans to execute that strategy. SPM is designed to produce an executable plan. It’s not just about the strategy and important decisions, but also whether and how the work gets done. SPM is a strategic approach to resource planning, which you need to have as part of your overall Resource Management (RM) strategy. The crux of RM: Without people, we can’t do work, we can’t execute projects, and we can’t implement strategy. Resource Management (RM) helps us most effectively utilize our people to achieve our business goals. RM helps match our supply of people (resource capacity) and our demand for people (resource allocation).
• Bottom-up approach: This is a more reactive style of planning, with little consideration for strategy while the planning is happening. The focus is on the projects that are already active or planned, not if or when those projects can get completed. In a bottom-up approach, current projects often overtake strategies or projects that help the business grow.

With either approach, it’s critical to manage employee skills and have a full understanding of each person’s workload, competencies, growth opportunities and areas where they want to gain more experience. Understanding your team’s skills is essential to optimizing project performance, managing those risks, and empowering and supporting your resources’ professional growth.

Skills Management in the Bigger Resource Planning Puzzle

Knowing everything about your employees and their skills is not enough to properly allocate them to projects and make those projects successful. Skills management needs to be leveraged within the larger picture of resource planning. What does it all mean?

• Capacity planning is the step taken at the onset of a new project or strategic initiative that involves determining if an organization has the capacity and skill sets among its people to fulfill the demand for projects currently in the queue and in planning stages. This strategic planning step can be done months or years ahead of the planned work, and takes into consideration time, skills and resource demand. Capacity planning looks at the funnel of work and priorities in advance of the work actually getting done, or even assigned. It pairs perfectly with a project/portfolio Demand Management process.
• Resource Forecasting is when you align your current talent with your strategic business initiatives. It’s about understanding the skills and people within your organization, and your company’s strategic goals. A Resource Manager compares supply and demand to understand the gaps between them, which can mean additional training for employees to gain skills needed for work, or additional hires to get the work completed.
• Resource utilization is the measure of how much work your people are doing at any given time, including work that is forecasted but not yet begun. Typically, resource utilization is best measured in FTE, or full-time equivalent. Resource utilization is an important metric to analyze employees after work has been assigned and after work has been completed. It examines the effectiveness of each resource both historically and how effective a resource can be in the future.confidentially. Organizations need to determine their comfort level with gathering and rating employees’ skills to proceed with resource allocation.
• Resource allocation is a process to staff a project and manage the resources put toward a project – before the work has been completed. Resource allocation is the action that a Resource Manager takes to find a resource utilization rate. Resource allocation is the actual assignment of work, and it can only be successful if assumptions for resources are built upon proper analysis from prior work.

Tempus Resource and Skills Management Capabilities

Resource Managers can take advantage of several skills management capabilities within Tempus to help with resource planning, including:

• Defining skills: Tempus enables users (which can be defined or secured with various security permissions) to create new skill sets, update existing skill sets, and define how skills or competencies are measured. Managers can include certifications or annual assessments achieved, knowledge of specific technologies, and can create range-based measurements. Tempus allows for flexibility across skill categories.
• Categorizing skills: In organizations of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of employees, not all people can be measured across the same skills or competencies. With Tempus, users can create and employ unique groupings of skills and competencies to measure what’s necessary on a resource-by-resource basis. Commonly, customers will assemble a company-wide set of skills or competencies to measure compliance or on-boarding related certifications, achievements, or skills. Items such as completing security awareness training or participating in diversity training are typically enterprise-wide measures of compliance. Likewise, Tempus users can group skills according to specific needs of their team, such as completing training on a particular coding software or completing annual continuing education classes. Tempus can customize skill categorizations and allow managers to deploy them as needed.
• User engagement: Tempus helps improve employee engagement and data collection by allowing end users to manage and update their personal skillsets.
• Security policies: There are customizable security settings within Tempus to ensure users can manage their own skills but only enable managers (or those with permission) to edit the skills matrix on a global level.
• Multi-modal skill assessment: Some organizations prefer a top-down approach to manage skill assessments while others prefer a bottom-up approach where resources are responsible for their own skill assessments. Others land somewhere in between, in a space where both managers and resources concurrently manage skill matrices. Tempus fully supports this multi-modal approach to skill management.
• Role-based security: Tempus enables leaders to set permissions and access to particular data and reports based on skill levels. With Global roles, Tempus users can define members of your staff who can manage the skill matrix settings, projects, and read-only or read-write permissions on specific data elements.
• As Tempus is purpose-built for resource forecasting and capacity planning, it has many tools and reports to help users with resource planning, both at the project level and task level. Users can plan by any time frame, including day, week, month, quarter or year. Additionally, resource allocation can be planned with many options, including hours, costs, FTE, or percentages.
• Integration with other skills management or HR software: Tempus has a flexible and scalable API so companies can integrate their current skills data into Tempus.