Quick Start Guide for Resource and Portfolio Management

With VISBO, you quickly gain an overview of your project portfolio and the corresponding resource utilization.

Because VISBO works with the assessments and experience of your project managers – and not with monstrous detailed plans. VISBO is a system that prevents micromanagement by design.

Prerequisites? None. Excel is good enough to start.

Here’s how to proceed:

Step 1) Determine the total capacity available for project work

Determine the total capacity availabe for project work. Ask your department heads to provide a list of which individuals in the department are generally available for project work and how much capacity they have. Initially, it is sufficient to base this on experience and average values. For example:

  • Person A from development, in addition to his regular duties and daily business, can devote 80 hours or 10.0 person-days per month to project work. Person A has skills in ‘Cyber-Security’ and ‘IT Architecture.’
  • Person B from development can devote 140 hours or 17.5 person-days per month to project work, in addition to his regular duties and daily business. Person B has skills in ‘Backend Server Development’ and ‘Automated Testing.’

If you already use an HR system for employee and vacation management, we can transfer this information via interfaces to VISBO.

Otherwise, you can enter this information into an Excel form ‘Resource Pool’ and an Excel vacation calendar provided by VISBO, and then upload it to VISBO.

 

Step 2) Determine the project key data  

Ask each project manager to describe the key data of his or her project or projects and initiatives:

  • Project start and estimated project end
  • Estimated resource and skill requirements in hours for the entire project or a specific project phase
  • Key dates and the expected outcomes at those times
  • The potential benefits or revenue expected in thousand euros (T €)

Important: This should not merely be a technical derivation or aggregation from an existing detailed plan. Instead, it should reflect the conviction and personal assessment of the project manager and team at this point in time.

Provide your project managers with a standardized Excel form for this purpose, which will then be uploaded to the VISBO Cloud.

Please contact us – we are happy to provide you with the Excel templates for Step 1 and 2 free of cost.

 

Step 3) Visualize, Analyse, Optimize

In VISBO, you can now visualize and analyze all currently ongoing projects in the portfolio as well as resource utilization. If you identify resource bottlenecks, please prioritize. Optimize the composition of the current portfolio. Make decisions on which initiatives and projects should be paused and resumed later.

Avoid extending projects and ‘spreading capacity too thinly across multiple projects’ at all costs. This causes significant productivity losses. Huge Productivity losses occur because work is constantly interrupted and must be resumed.

By prioritizing, you ensure that ongoing projects can be completed as quickly as possible and the next projects from the pipeline can be started or resumed. This significantly shortens project durations – and you can accomplish more projects with the same team.

 

Short Impression (Video)

In this 2-minute video, you will get a brief impression of a quick start in resource and portfolio management: Video Quick Start (clicking will redirect you to YouTube).

 

What are the next steps?

We offer a series of workshops that will help you continuously increase productivity in project portfolio management, beyond this quick start. This will enable you to complete projects faster and more successfully. Specifically, you will learn how to permanently eliminate the two major productivity killers: micromanagement and having too-many-projects-at-the-same-time.

What makes this workshop series special: Here, theory is immediately implemented into your practice. You will learn pragmatic and simple principles and apply what you learned right away based on your people and your projects.

5 workshops in 4 weeks – at your company’s premises: here you can find more information about the goals, prerequisites, and the structure of the workshop series.

If you are interested in a free informational discussion about the workshop series, please book a free 60 Min consultation here. We can quickly determine if we can also help you.

Contact us to learn more!