As managing multiple projects with a shared resource pool has become a common practice in today’s business world, understanding the difference between traditional project management and multi-project management is a cornerstone of on-time delivery. To handle multiple projects successfully, project managers should take care of not only projects themselves but also resource efficiency with the right resource workload management tools. Read further to understand the importance of workload management in orchestrating multiple projects.
What Is Workload Management?
Workload management implies allocation of resources to the tasks across the project portfolio with further management of their execution. It involves capacity planning, scheduling, and resource allocation optimisation to ensure smooth project delivery.
Workload management and resource allocation both imply assigning tasks to resources in such a way that their workload is balanced to ensure their maximum efficiency, but the difference is that workload management involves further control of the process and its optimization.
Why Is Workload Management So Important in Multi-Project Environments?
When managing multiple projects with a shared resource pool, planning and execution should be based on resource dependency between projects. The most important rule for multi-project management is to avoid extensive workload, i.e., overload. And let’s see why.
If one resource group is overloaded, it becomes a bottleneck: the amount of work accumulates making other resource groups idle waiting for the predecessor tasks to be completed. As soon as the predecessor tasks are finished, the idle group becomes overloaded too because of the increased amount of work. This has a snowball effect: every further resource group becomes a bottleneck, which significantly affects the delivery dates.
Proper workload management helps project and resource managers avoid overloading individual resources or resource groups and enhance their efficiency, which contributes to the timely completion of multiple projects.
The Advantages of Proper Workload Management
Good workload management provides dozens of benefits to the projects, among which the following are most important:
- It improves resource efficiency and productivity,
- It prevents bottlenecks,
- It helps avoid employee burnout,
- It assists in on-time project delivery.
So, how can a project manager ensure proper workload management of resources?
Ensuring Efficient Workload Management: Best Practices
Below you’ll find the most efficient workload management tips that will help you maximize your teams’ productivity and gain the desired project results.
Prioritise projects and tasks within them
Correct prioritization is the first step in a multi-project management strategy and is essential to ensure proper workload management. The projects and tasks should be ordered according to existing constraints to ensure the smooth delivery of all projects in the portfolio, considering resource dependency between them.
Plan resource capacity in advance
Staffing projects is the next step in multi-project management. A project/resource manager should make sure that there are enough resources to handle the required scope of work.
Allocate resources based on existing constraints
Resources should be allocated to project tasks based on the established priorities and the required skills. One of the most important aspects of resource allocation is assigning resources to tasks that fully match their level of experience and competence. Otherwise, too difficult tasks will lead to mistakes, need to rework, and eventually cause emotional burnout and decreased productivity, which will lead to project delays.
Track resource performance in real time
The real-time tracking of resource performance is a necessary prerequisite for project success. It’s even more important than project progress because it reflects the state of things at the resource-task level. If a bottleneck occurs at this stage, you’ll have enough time to find a solution, but if you detect a delay when tracking project progress, it may be too late to improve things, because the problem becomes visible at the project level long after its real occurrence.
Apply workload balancing techniques
Utilize resource optimization techniques if you see that there isn’t enough capacity to cope with the required amount of work.
You can use either resource leveling or resource smoothing or combine these thechiques to ensure smooth and on-time delivery.
Following these practices is essential but challenging without the right tool. Workload management software not only simplifies all the processes but also provides additional insights that a human brain cannot deliver due to the enormous amounts of data to be processed.
What Is a Workload Management Tool?
A workload management tool is a software solution that helps allocate resources across the projects in such a way that their workload is balanced. These tools also prioritize projects and tasks based on available constraints, plan resource capacity to staff projects, and allow tracking resource performance and project progress. So, what features help improve workload management?
Workload Management Tools’ Features to Improve Employee Performance
Lets overview the main features of workload management tools through the example of Epicflow multi-project resource management software that help balance resource load and improve productivity.
Automatic prioritization of projects and tasks
The software solution automatically prioritizes projects and tasks based on existing constraints and creates task lists for every resource and resource group which is their roadmap in project execution, which are adjusted according to real-time changes in projects. This prevents overload and helps balance the workload of employees and increase their productivity.
Semi-automatic resource allocation
Assigning resources to tasks has never been that comfortable and easy: all data about resources’ experience and skills is stored in the system and is automatically matched with that of the tasks. Resource Allocation Advisor helps project/resource managers make perfect resource allocation decisions with a couple of clicks.
Automatic pipeline leveling and project staggering
If there’s a capacity constraint, you can enable pipeline leveling to predict the delivery dates of the projects based on automatically calculated priorities, network constraints, and available capacity. If you can see that project delays are unavoidable, utilize project staggering to move start dates of the projects in such a way that the available resources can finish the projects with minimum delays.
What-if scenarios
Try any project management actions to see their consequences on your projects in a test environment. For example, if a new project is on the way, you can check if the available resources can cope with the increased amount of tasks. You can assign and reassign resources and tasks, change milestones, activate and deactivate projects and check the results without any harm to your real project environment.
Load and bottleneck analysis
Check the workload of your teams and individual resources in real time and examine the projects and tasks that they’re currently working on. This helps timely detect any issues in their workload and take urgent measures to balance it. If a bottleneck has occurred, you can easily check the resources or groups as well as tasks and projects that have caused it. Then you can take actions to resolve the bottleneck and try out them with the above-mentioned what-if analysis.
Conclusion
Workload management is crucial for the success of any project, especially if we’re talking about multi-project environments with a shared resource pool. To balance resource workload and enhance productivity, a project/resource manager should utilize workload management tools that significantly simplify almost all project and resource management processes ensuring on-time delivery.
