One of the biggest challenges resource managers face is being able to understand how changes to resource levels, skill mixes and resource allocations will affect their project timings and resource capacity and resource utilization. This could be tactical changes to resolve urgent project resource shortfalls or long-range strategic decisions about resource hiring levels.
The solution is to use what-if scenario analysis which lets you visualize the outcomes on your projects and people when making adjustments to your resource pool and projects.
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What is what if scenario analysis in resource management?
What if scenario analysis enables resource managers to analyze the impact of things like changes to resource levels, project timings, and resource allocations. It gives resource managers a crystal ball so they can understand the likely impact of changes rather than relying on everything going to plan.
Therefore, It’s great for helping predict bottlenecks that may appear in the future and helping you figure out what measures you can take to avoid delays that may be caused by these bottlenecks.
There are three features of what-if planning that make it particularly powerful:
- You can see the impact on your plan of proposed changes without your original plan being changed.
- You can make macro-level changes. So for example, if you want to see the impact of delaying a project by two months, you just shift the whole project and all the work in the project moves accordingly.
- The ability to compare different planning options to see which works out best.
Getting started with what if scenario analysis in resource management
To help explain what-if analysis, let’s take a look at how it works in Kelloo and use some examples of the types of changes you may need to model.
- Extend or shorten a project
- Delaying a project.
- Cancelling or approving a new project.
- Hiring more people.
- Comparing different planning options.
- Changing priorities.
Extend or shorten a project
This is a really common scenario. Let’s say you have a project that looks like it is going to overrun by a month and you want to see what knock-on effect that will have. In Kelloo you would use the re-size what if feature. This lets you extend or compress the length of a project and also adjust the amount of work remaining accordingly.
Delaying a project
This is really easy to model. Just select the project you want to move and shift it to a new date.
Cancelling or approving a new project
If you want to model cancelling a project, simply hit the toggle to exclude the project from your plan. The project will still be visible but all the allocation data is excluded from utilization and financial calculations.
To model the impact of approving a new project, simply add it to your plan and include it in the utilization and financial calculations by hitting the include toggle.
Hiring more people
Your resource pool in Kelloo is the total headcount you currently have available. When you model hiring or reducing headcount you are varying the headcount of the pool. You do this by adding resource adjustments. In the following example, we have increased our developer headcount from 6 to 7 FTE for a four-week period.
Comparing different planning options
To compare different planning options you create versions of a plan – in Kelloo these are called scenarios. Each scenario is independent of the other so you can compare them back to back.
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Model changes to project and work priority
The fact is, you are unlikely to be able to do every project requested so resources should be targeted onto higher priority projects first.
Kelloo lets you model how changing priorities impacts your plans and people. All you need to do is simply drag and drop projects to prioritize them – Kelloo will then tell you which projects will run out of resources first.
