5 Steps to Effective Resource Planning with Forrester

5 Steps To Effective Resource PlanningMargo Visitacion, Vice President/Principal Analyst

© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited 3

Housekeeping Items

› 40 minutes of presentation

› 15 minutes of Q&A

› All lines are on mute

› Enter questions into chat box

› Event is being recorded

› Slides will be shared post presentation


Today’s Presenters› Featured Speaker: Margo Visitacion› Vice President/Principal Analyst,

Forrester Research› 25+ years of experience in IT,

developing and implementing QA, and PMOs

› Moderator: Tushar Patel › SVP of Marketing, Innotas› Previously at and Mocana Corp and

National Semiconductor


Agenda

› No doubt about it, resource management is tough

› Embrace the new reality› Five best practices› Recommendations


Resource management: today’s biggest challenge

Level 1 - ad hoc

Level 2

Level 3 - Some definition, inconsistent use

Level 4

Level 5 - Defined, widely utilized and optimized

11%

20%

37%

23%

9%

15%

9%

30%

29%

17%

On a scale of 1 – 5, rate the current state of your PMO

Monitoring portfolio performance Forecasting resource capacity

Source: Forrester Research – 2015 State of EA, SP and PMO Global Online Survey


Old school reality

$ $ $ $ $

$ $ $ $ $

$ $ $ $ $

$ $ $ $ $

R&D Mfg. Finance

Annual Initiatives

Bottom-up list of wishes / projects

Pass to IT for “tentative estimates”

Exec Mgt:Mission statement

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

$$$$$

Exec mgt.chokes on the

total cost

Budget wars reach a

“negotiated settlement”

Fallacy: precise demand forecasts, fixed demand, rigorous planning, predictable work patterns


Source: Forrester’s BT Apps and Collaboration Survey 2014

New school reality

• 26% telecommute at least once a week• 35% work at a client site at least a few

times a month

Highly autonomous

workforce

• 70% collaborate directly with customers, clients or patients

• 14% collaborate with co-workers in other countries

Event driven with

diminished predictability

• Information workers leverage an average of 8 applications per day to perform their jobMulti-tasking


New school reality staffing issues


Finding and filling resource gaps makes forecasting harder


Agenda




People work differently today100% planned

allocation

50% actualavailability


Approaches are different, tooTraditional project and

task planning

Plan

Analyze

Design

Code

Test

Implement

Cer

tain

ty

Low

High

Churn/change = $$€££

Agile, iterative and hybrid lifecycles


Cross-functional organizations are common in the age of the customer

Source: April 10, 2015, “Improve Customers’ Experience By Improving Employees’ Effectiveness” Forrester report


It’s time to stop thinking in terms of utilization

Throughput!


Agenda




Before you start…..›Get commitment to measure throughput, not utilization

› Identify ideal outcomes – better managing skills? Smarter sourcing?

›Assess current state – know your gaps and your bottlenecks

›Pilot with a few teams first

›Measure!!!!


Base: 600 IT professionals with app development responsibilities from US, Canada, UK, France, & GermanySource: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM, May 2014

5 best practices to improve resource management 1. Strive for throughput, not utilization

2. Deliver in Small Batches

3. Dedicate Teams

4. Minimize Hand-offs, Maximize Flow

5. Eliminate Overhead

+ 1 more: Practice Transparency


Minimum Viable Product (MVP) = identify needs and commit

Deliver MVP Quickly – Improve Based On Feedback

… …

R1 R2 R3 R4 R5 R6 R7


Smaller batches of work = faster speed, more feedback, less failure

much better than


Old thinking: organize in “silos”Li

ne o

f Bus

ines

s

Ope

ratio

ns

Busin

ess A

naly

sts

Deve

lope

rs

Qua

lity

Assu

ranc

e

Ente

rpris

eAr

chite

ctur

e

CIO

Cust

omer

Expe

rienc

e

CMO COO


Siloed roles increase hand-offs

Project A

Project B

Project C

Old Goal: Maximize Utilization

New Goal: Maximize Throughput


Dedicated teams are cross-functional, organized by product

Agile development team

Architecture OpsBusinessanalysis

PM DevDevBA Devlead

Dev Dev Tester Tester

Steady - state

Shared resources


Identify value streams to reduce waste/eliminate bottlenecks

“Application Delivery In The Modern Age”, February 12, 2014

Idea Understand Needs Develop Test Deploy Customer

Value

1 day 3 days 5 days 5 days 3 days

10 days7 days 4 days 9 days

Total = 47 daysLead time ladder

Process timeLead time


Idea proposed

Understand Needs & Invent

Solutions

Develop, Commit & Build

Functional Testing

Deploy Solution

Customer Value

Load, Performance, Security, …

Testing

UAT/Exploratory

Testing

ReleaseDecision

Typical bottlenecks

Too Much WIP

Lack of access to Dev & Test Environments

• Lack of Effective Build/Integration Automation

• Manual Testing• Design Complexity

Lack of effective API-driven test automation

Lack of effective effective release candidate quality information

Manual environment management and deployment

Lack of Effective Customer Insight

Ever-present bottlenecks: hand-offs and wait time


Increase the scale, portfolio management controls complexity

Source: www.craiglarman.com

• Sequencing sprints• Release planning• Consistent cadence

for monitor/reporting


Rules of thumb:• Keep resource pools as simple

as possible for greater flexibility in managing hybrid organizations• Organize by capabilities• Establish teams as units and

associate resources by tagging• Forecasting for non dedicated resources:

• Never forecast at 100% - take theirday job into account

• Capture ALL the work• Everything is on the backlog – strive

for just enough information to help you makea decision

• Measure for velocity


But what about time tracking????

By milestone Tied to a deliverable

Per Agile sprint Features delivered

By activity Project managementRequirementsDesignCoding/unit testingTestingRelease managementDocumentationTraining

Tracking project time:

Make it simpleImportant to focus on ETC

% complete – cannot be a SWAG

Deliverable

Innotas © 2015

Resource Capacity & Demand Planning

Predictive Analytics & Planning

Dashboards & Reporting

Waterfall / Agile

ProjectsApps

Integration Platform

Existing Systems

Portfolio & PrioritizationStrategic Planning

Improved Execution

Innotas Overview

Innotas © 2015

True Enterprise Resource Management

Innotas © 2015

Predictive Portfolio Analysis™ (PPA)Portfolio Planning Recommends & schedules the highest value

portfolio based on resource constraints

Resource Planning Achieve peak usage of resources and ensure

highest value of work is being executed

Resource Forecasting & Gap Analysis Improve stakeholder relationships by

communicating more accurate forecasts & resourcing hiring needs

Re-Planning and Re-ForecastingIncrease business agility by adapting to changes

in market and business environment quickly

Innotas © 2015

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5 Steps to Effective Resource Planning with Forrester