Allocating People To Work. The Obvious Priority.

Allocating people to work has to be the most fundamental responsibility for line managers, hasn’t it? It’s so obvious, it is rarely discussed, right? 

So why then are some workers regularly stretching their work week to complete multiple activities on time, while others scratch about trying to keep busy. Or why do business units quickly hire contingent workers, while others are letting people go? And why are low utilisation results or late delivery of poor quality product such common events? 

This is particularly true in Project Based Enterprises (PBE’s) like consultants, contractors, PMO’s and software vendors.

Let me explain why, what to consider and tips when allocating people. Then tell me if you think I'm missing something!

It’s pretty simple isn’t it - the fundamental role of any PBE manager? Source people resources, secure work, coordinate people to produce deliverables - meanwhile ensuring the resource pool will be fully utilised and people aren’t overworked. I’ve always felt that to do this really well - is hard - for managers of just 10 people, let alone 100 or 1000, or even 10,000. Whether planning or allocating people, optimising outcomes for the whole enterprise is an enterprise-wide mission.

As discussed in my first article in this series, if you or your enterprise have already planned just enough people then half the battle is already won.

However, the step of allocating exactly the right amount of work to all your people is tedious because the numbers are complex, methods confused and there’s a lot of information to exchange.  Too much work gets allocated at workers desks, or in meetings, with a manager in one off undocumented discussions. Finally, managers have better things to do than maintain DIY spreadsheets or wrestle with inadequate software.

I’ve observed six areas of challenge that you might consider when you are allocating people to work.

1. Poor visibility of the future

Making informed allocation decisions is difficult, because future outcomes are influenced by core facts that fluctuate, and so you need to be able to predict both. 

Core facts include:

• What projects or activities need what Roles, when and by how much?

• What people can do the Role, when and with what spare availability? 

Even before analysis begins, just the collation of this information is hard enough because the decision maker often relies on someone else to provide it.

However, these are only core facts. To make decisions you really need a higher-level understanding of three future outcomes:

• Ability to deliver

• People’s workload

• Utilisation.

2. Quantifying the answers

Allocation decisions are partly qualitative in their nature. For example, ‘Bill will be the Front-End Developer on Project 324’. However, the quantum of that decision (e.g. 200 hours budget, starting 21st July, for 5 weeks) and its implications (e.g. team utilisation for August will now be at 85%) vary by degrees that can only be described numerically and therefore must be quantified. 

Most managers that have done this will agree that the numbers quickly get complex, and a robust, dynamic model is required.

3. Allocating just enough work

Getting allocation to ‘close enough’ can be really fiddly. Some people have a too much work, others a too little. Likewise activities get allocated to too few or too many people. Once these imperfections are identified, managers need the ability to easily tweak their decisions.

4. Making decisions too late

Allocation perfection often is elusive because there’s insufficient time to act and manager’s are left accepting compromised outcomes in regard to people’s workload, on time delivery of quality product or utilisation.

5. Keeping up with change

At a moment’s notice, the change (like the timing of an activity, someone’s availability or a new project) can throw chaos into an enterprise, or not. But how will you know? 

Without a robust model, how can you quickly input the new core facts and check the implications of the change? And what if you were not the decision maker, how long before you are informed of the change?

6. Communicating core facts, outcomes and decisions

Without easy access to core facts, outcomes and decisions, then poor coordination of people and work will eventuate, leading to waste. 

Allocation information must be shared easily with your team and project managers (as a minimum) to enable the checking of time and budget expectations and the informal (if not formal) ‘Acceptance’ of allocation decisions.

Generating allocation decisions, along with all other effort management activities, is a whole of enterprise mission that should involve everyone.

Using a centralised model and technology (Figure 1) will outperform those DIY spreadsheets.

For many enterprises the above challenges and consequences are just ‘business as usual’. It is a manager’s burden to judge whether to be satisfied with just being effective, or whether to drive improvement and efficiency when allocating people and work.

Do you agree, or is everything as good as it can be? I'd like to hear your comment.

For more detail about the challenges and solutions when allocating people and work, visit RESRODEL. In the next and last article of this series, I talk about more about optimising outcomes.

Alex is the creator of the Effort Management Theorem, the ‘Resource Role Model’ application and founder of RESRODEL software solution business.  Alex is also a contributor to the ‘Workforce Management’ Working Group, in the Human Resource Committee at the International Standards Organisation. Opinions expressed in this article are Alex’s alone.