0.11 Project planning  (Page 12/21)

Resources are people, equipment, locations, or anything else that you need in order to do all of the activities that you planned for. Every activity in your activity list needs to have resources assigned to it. Before you can assign resources to your project, you need to know which ones you’re authorized to use; that’s called resource availability. Resource availability includes information about what resources you can use on your project and when they’re available to you. Don’t forget that some resources like consultants or training rooms have to be scheduled in advance, and they might only be available at certain times. You’ll need to know this before you can finish planning your project. If you are starting to plan in January, a June wedding is harder to plan than one in December, because the wedding halls are all booked up in advance. That is clearly a resource constraint. You’ll also need the activity list that you created earlier, and you’ll need to know about how your organization typically handles resources. Once you’ve got a handle on these things, you’re set for resource estimation.

Estimating the resources

The goal of activity resource estimating is to assign resources to each activity in the activity list. There are five tools and techniques for the activity resource estimating process. Some of them have technical sounding names, but they’re all actually pretty sensible when you think about it. They should make sense to you when you think about what you have to do when you have to figure out what resources your project needs.

• Expert judgment means bringing in experts who have done this sort of work before and getting their opinions on what resources are needed ( [link] ).
• Alternative analysis means considering several different options for how you assign resources. This includes varying the number of resources as well as the kind of resources you use. Many times, there’s more than one way to accomplish an activity and alternative analysis helps decide among the possibilities.
• Published estimating data is something that project managers in a lot of industries use to help them figure out how many resources they need. They rely on articles, books, journals, and periodicals that collect, analyze, and publish data from other people’s projects.
• Project management software such as Microsoft project will often have features designed to help project managers estimate resource needs and constraints and find the best combination of assignments for the project.
• Bottom-up estimating means breaking down complex activities into pieces and working out the resource assignments for each piece. It is a process of estimating these individual activities or costs and then adding these up together to come up with a total estimate. Here you estimate every scheduled activity individually and then roll up that estimate; or add them all together, to come up with a total. Bottom-up estimating is a very accurate means of estimating, provided the estimates at the schedule activity level are accurate. However, it takes a considerable amount of time to perform bottom-up estimating because every activity must be accessed and estimated accurately to be included in the bottom-up calculation. The smaller and more detailed the activity, the greater the accuracy and cost of this technique.