[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Also,  even if that early staff allocation turnsout to be wasted, your political situation may be safer with all those peo-ple on-board early then if you were to proceed leanly staffed throughthe first six months [5].This isn t to say that you should staff up theproject to where many team members are sitting idly or, worse, slowingthe progress of the project (e.g., the mythical man month).Rather, ifcertain critical resources aren t needed for several weeks, but are diffi-cult to acquire, get them now rather than risk a last-minute, doomed-to-failure political battle.Once a resource is acquired, the PM should stick with his allottedtime for that resource.The reason for this is  if one project requires aresource more than expected, it affects other projects requiring thatresource [10].The only way to audit this would be to validate that theresource is applying their core, highest demand skills to the project.TheIT PMO audit team could include just such a check when conductingResource Management 167audits of ongoing projects (see Chapter 10).If the PM has held onto aresource beyond the required need, the IT PMO will need to have theauthority (and accountability) to distribute resources to mitigate theoverall risk of the portfolio.7.2 Supporting ResourcesPMs who are beginning their careers will apply the project managementknowledge they ve learned in courses and from books.Following suchproject management standards helps guide the manager toward suc-cessful project completion.But the daily battles will rely just as much onthe manager s leadership skills (e.g., team building, inspiration, vision).Such skills will help keep the team continuously glued together as afocused force.When applying such principles to interproject resourcemanagement, an IT PMO needs to ensure that resources and their func-tional managers feel comfortable about the direction their careers andtheir departments are moving, respectively.Just as a PM coordinatesthe team to move in the direction of project success, an IT PMO coordi-nates the organization to move cohesively in the direction of strategicsuccess.Part of this coordination involves ensuring that resourcesreceive fair and ongoing career support between projects.Such cross-project attention helps resources feel that contributions to any project,as well as to their departmental manager, carry just as much weight ontheir performance reviews.To ensure that a project-oriented organization gets the utmost out-put from its personnel on projects, employees performance evaluationsneed to also be tied to their work on projects.This means that projectsponsors will need to also participate in a project member s careergrowth and not rely on their functional managers to fulfill all of thesetasks.Sure, human resources lays out guidelines for peer reviews, man-agement reviews, and career path templates.But, to support such long-term (usually annual) goals, PMs need to ensure that the resource willbe a good asset to the project (i.e., happy, focused, motivated, and pro-ductive).The IT PMO can support the functional manager by ensuringthe projects to which the resource is assigned map to the goals of theindividual s career, as well as the goals of the company.Then, with such168 IT Project Portfolio Managementmultidirectional support from the organization, the resource can beheld fairly accountable during their performance review.7.3 Scheduling ResourcesScheduling resources on a project has always been one of the key chal-lenges of a PM.Even when the PM has a good bead on a resource thatthey have worked with several times in the past, a personal crisis or anunforeseen technical hurdle can throw schedule estimates out the win-dow.To account for such unknowns, the PM can use the common tech-nique of adding buffers to the end of each major work package.Forexample, if the resource feels that it will take three days to complete atask, the PM will add it as a four-day task to the project plan.The extraday is an implicit buffer, or an increase in the duration of a task just toaccount for risk.Another method of adding time buffers to a project isshown in Figure 7.2.Here, a program of dependent projects has explicittime buffers added to the end of some critical release iterations in eachproject.These buffers, which are a part of the project plan, act as a sec-ondary level of schedule risk mitigation.Combined, both types ofscheduling buffers can help keep projects on a planned schedule and,thus, reduce the overall risk for failure [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]