In the last blog we looked at what caused burnout, and why it was frequently a particular problem for high performance teams. No one wants to create burnout in individuals or teams, but the absence of a comprehensive project portfolio management (PPM) solution such as Sciforma Vantage make it a much more likely outcome. In this post, we’re going to look at why that’s the case.
Who is available?
Let’s start with what should be an easy question. Who is available to work on your key projects? A simple question, but a far from simple answer.
Suppose you have 100 people in total assigned to projects. A common model suggests that 15% of an individual’s time is taken up with non-work activities. Personal endeavors, coffee runs, hallway chats, and the like. That same model says that 15% of what’s left is consumed by general work items rather than assigned tasks. That’s things like corporate emails, functional team meetings, and so on. So your 100 people is really 72 and a bit.
But even that’s not right. Because that assumes that every minute of the assigned task time is productive, and it isn’t. It takes time to switch from one task to the next, and that takes longer if a specialist has to switch between more than one project. Then there is the wait time because a dependent task didn’t complete on time, or because an approval hasn’t been received. So now, we’re probably closer to 60 productive people.
Except, you can’t use them all. Because if you assign every person to a task then you have no flexibility to implement changes and adjustments when environments evolve, circumstances change, or priorities shift. And those things will happen. In reality, your 100 people are nearer to 50 full time equivalents (FTEs).
Without a PPM solution tracking that time – both productive, unavailable, and reserve, you have no idea where those 50 FTEs are, and that means that you are inevitably frustrating some people by underutilizing them, and risking burnout with others by over-allocating them. And that’s just the start.
Plans vs. actuals
There’s an old saying “it’s a plan, it’s supposed to be wrong”. Resource tracking and management generally starts with planned work, usually at the project level. That can be consolidated to the strategic portfolio level to provide a reasonable assumption of the enterprise resource allocations, but that’s still only for plans.
When the work starts, things change. Tasks take more or less time, missed dependencies are identified, people have unexpected absences, etc. Your PPM solution must be able to consume actual data as an update to plans, providing decision makers with an accurate and timely reflection of what is actually happening. Without it, you’ll miss the fact that individuals and teams are becoming overworked, risking burnout.
But we’re still not done.
Capability and capacity
Most resource plans are based on the number of people available, maybe going down to consider job function. But not every software developer, QA analyst, or whatever is created equal. Some work needs higher skilled, or specialist skilled people with more experience, and some doesn’t. If you have single points of expertise in your organization those people are going to be in high demand, creating additional stressors and putting those individuals – often the most critical individuals, at greater risk of burnout.
PPM solutions don’t eliminate the chance of burnout, but they help identify where it is likely to occur. Combine that with leaders looking for the early warning signs and organizations can go a long way to eliminating the problem. What are those signs? That’s what we’ll look at next.
If you want to learn more about how Sciforma can help you with resource management and sustainable productivity request a demo. One of our team will happily show you the ins and outs of our industry defining software. Or, request a product tour and you can explore the advantages of Sciforma Vantage at your own leisure.
