Tooling for Resource Planning

Navigating resource management challenges

Just like with project planning, most tools on the market cover resourcing in the same way: non-swarming and projectized. For some industries, this practice is fine and makes sense with how they approach resourcing. However, as discussed in this chapter, tech companies tend to use capacity planning that may shift due to priorities over the life of the project.

The lack of swarming capabilities means that a task timeline won’t automatically reduce when you add additional resources, it will actually reduce the time each resource works on the task and keep the duration the same. Some tools allow you to change this behavior, but it isn’t consistent. This means any time you need to swarm—or even want to know what the impact of swarming would be—you need to do it manually, either through changing durations or forcing the hours spent to reduce the calendar time.

In prioritization meetings, we often receive inquiries from management about available dates to meet with resources $$ ...