Balancing your staff levels can make or break a business. If you end up with more staff than you need it will seriously compromise your profitability. Even worse, if you end up with more staff with a particular skill set (eg. Developers) and less than you need of another (e.g Testers). In this scenario you will have people doing nothing while there is work that you can't deliver.
This makes Resource Forecasting a skill which separates to best managers from the rest of the pack. The question is how can you make this potentially tricky task something simple, which can become an easy part of your day.
1. Role Types
The first step is to identify the roles in your team. In a software development team you commonly find Analysts, Developers, Testers etc. Each of these roles contributes a distinct skill to a project. You will use this information to determine how many of each role type will be required for current and future projects. The first step is to assign each member of your team a Role.
Now you have assigned roles to each staff member, you understand your total resource pool. At this stage you don't know exactly how many you need or how many you have free.
2. Projects
The next step is to create the projects your team will be working on now and in the future. Take this down to the task level so you can map which staff will be working on which exact parts of the project, and for how long.
3. Assign Current Resource
To get an accurate picture you should assign your team members to each task. In this way you know how committed those people are. You will be taking these people out of the available pool by assigning them.
Using Team Effect you can assign multiple people to different parts of each task, adjusting the level of their committement. These are the tools you need to ensure your predictions are accurate. Since it is done visually it is simple to confirm the end result is correct.
4. Assign Roles to Future Projects
In the same way that you assigned staff to tasks for current projects you need to assign role types to future projects. This is done in a very similar way but instead of picking a staff member select "Role" from the Type drop-down and select one. You will see a role type (eg. Analyst) is scheduled onto the task.
By doing this you are accurately planning how many of each role type, or skill set you will need in the future.
Reporting on this information
There are several ways to view this information.
1. The Utilization Report
This report shows you the number of each role type you need. It includes people of that role type who are scheduled as well as roles which are forecast.
2. Role Schedules
From the Roles menu you can see all your roles and click through to view all projects with the role scheduled. This shows you projects awaiting resource.
Summary
As you can see it is easy to maintain roles or schedules on each project individually. The powerful information you are building is the picture of what your resource requirements actually are. This is a critical aspect of running a high performing and profitable team.
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