Group,
A very easy method for project staff management is to create parallel horizontal bar charts for each active project and show them under a weekly time line. The simplest method is to show the project phases such as Predesign, SD, DD, CD, BD, CCA, Post Const. or whatever phasing names you are using. Include significant milestones such as presentations, submissions, etc. You can make this complex or simple, but often simple will do the trick. Then assign staff to each week for each project, for instance, Week 12 may have 2.5 Drftr, 0.5 desr, 0.2 princ, 1.0 spec, etc. assigned to a school job. You can load the data from your project budget. One assumes you will be doing this on a computer using Excel or a more sophisticated management software, and if so, you can assign hourly rates for actual personnel or hourly averages for personnel in each group. Instead of adding down so that the totals for the week are at the bottom, show them at the top. Then each Friday or Monday gather the PMs to update the past week and their expectations of the the next two weeks. This will give you an instantaneous graphic picture of your staffing needs, shortfalls and over staffing. If you see 400 total hours for all projects in week, and you only have 8 technical personnel, prepare for overtime or to move some people around. It's really quite easy. Once you get the hang of it, factor in known and assumed vacations, client slowdowns, etc. This will help you keep the "takt" portion of "project flow" moving more smoothly.
I learned this system when I was an Air force pilot and we had to depict missions flown and sorties projected with all crew members, available aircraft, fuel, etc. During the neolithic age in my Architectural office in Albuquerque, we had a large plastic chart on the wall (reminiscent of my military days) with colored tape depicting the design phases (green was always SD phase and red was always the CD phase, I am not sure if this was caused by an emotional or financial response) and we actually used grease pencils to show manpower requirements. More efficient tools are certainly available, but having it on the wall allowed everyone to see what was up and to correct inaccuracies. After all, architects and engineers are visual. If you have a large format color printer, try it out.
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James Brown AIA
Scottsdale, AZ
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-31-2013 12:50
From: Harry Steinway
Subject: Staffin Planning
Greetings All:
I'm interested in how other firms do staffing planning. We have a staffing meeting every Monday morning, and review the staffing commitments for each project. However, there is no forward planning done at this meeting. We forecast net fee revenues for each project, but only convert these to FTEs using a basic average billable amount across all staff.
While we have Vision and use it for project budgeting, we are not using the Project Planning module. I know this does very detailed resource allocation reports, but I doubt that we will ever get all our PMs to really commit to doing detailed project plans, and without plans for every project, you can't really do resource allocation.
I'd love to hear from other firms that have simple staffing planning tools that work!
Thanks in advance for your comments.
Harry
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Harry Steinway Assoc. AIA
CO Architects
Los Angeles CA
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