Planning Resources in a Technology Landscape

Every industry has its own unique challenges in project and program management and the tech industry is no different. There are two main aspects to resourcing that are consistent across the tech industry and are worth exploring in more depth:

• Prioritization

• Team overhead

Prioritization

Most large tech companies don’t follow a projectized resourcing model where a project is formed, resources are assigned, and the project keeps the same funding throughout its life. Instead, these companies utilize capacity-constrained prioritization, where they perform multiple prioritization exercises throughout the year to align their existing capacity to the most strategic projects. The frequency of these exercises varies from company to company, and in some cases, team to team, but can happen as often as monthly, quarterly, yearly, or some combination of these. This cyclical prioritization relationship is demonstrated in the figure below.

The preceding diagram shows the relationship between the project plan and the capacity-constrained prioritization process used in tech companies. This is essentially a specialized version of the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) process. Once a project is planned and resourcing is set, a team prioritization cycle can then increase or decrease the number of resources for the project. Either way, this leads to replanning based on the new numbers we have. ...