Strategic portfolio management encompasses many areas of activity and decision-making that contribute to an agile and value-based project organization. However, the effectiveness of all, hopefully well-prioritized, business activities depends directly on optimized, strategic resource planning.

We explore the following questions in this blog post:

• What is the impact of inadequate resource planning?
• How does strategic resource management influence business success?
• How does strategic resource management relate to demand management processes?
• What should companies pay attention to when introducing strategic resource management?

What company is not familiar with resource conflicts? Even if project ideas have been professionally evaluated and prioritized in line with strategic goals, resource bottlenecks occur time and time again during the implementation phase. This may be because workloads have been incorrectly estimated, employees have dropped out or project priorities have shifted. If too few or fewer resources are available while objectives and schedules remain the same, this can lead to overload and confusion with considerable damage to the business.

Without stringent resource management , the following risks arise:

• Project deadlines cannot be met.
• The quality of the work results drops.
• Project budgets are significantly exceeded due to inefficiencies.
• Internal projects have to be canceled in favor of customer projects despite considerable investment.
• New business opportunities cannot be seized due to maximum tied-up resources.
• Confidence in corporate planning decreases.
• Employee turnover increases.

Solid, continuously adapted capacity planning is therefore a key management task.

For resource planning to work, it requires meaningful data and information with which a resource manager can work and be effective. At the same time, it is important to avoid excessive documentation efforts for projects to avoid demotivating employees. A digital solution makes the process easier.

With the availability of historical data, assumptions over time become increasingly accurate and planning becomes more granular and even more effective thanks to automated data prefilling. However, before the support of artificial intelligence can take effect, the target/actual data must be collected and maintained by project managers and project staff. This concerns time expenditure, costs, operational and technical resources, but also the presentation of the skills required to deploy employees in the best possible way.

The transparency achieved through data-driven resource management significantly changes the performance of a project portfolio:

• The resource factor can be weighted more heavily in project prioritization, which leads to better decisions.
• The ability to plan and agility in dealing with business activities increases.
• Optimization options in operational project work become more comprehensive.
• Resource shortages and other risks are identified at an early stage and can be proactively mitigated through a variety of measures such as recruiting, training, outsourcing or rescheduling.
• New, flexible forms of collaboration can be realized through skills-based staffing.
• Cross-team synergies can be better identified and strengthened.
• Cross-departmental resource coordination is objectified and aligned with the joint achievement of strategic goals.
• Sustainability aspects can be taken into account more specifically.

However, for a company’s strategic planning to be reflected in resource management, another process must also be taken into account – demand management. Here, project ideas are specified according to their market potential and implementation costs, and ideally only then are they defined as resource requests. If project requirements change, this also has an impact on resource planning. If these processes are mapped digitally, these planning dimensions remain synchronized within the company so that the company can act agilely and efficiently in a dynamic market environment.

As a tried and tested implementation partner, we know that it is not always possible to implement demand management and resource management in parallel, even if this would be the ideal approach. It is important to recognize cross-process issues. The scope of the process behind strategic portfolio management is enormous, but it should by no means be a deterrent. In the best sense, strategic portfolio management is about breaking down the silo mentality of an organization. When implementing SPM processes, it is therefore important to take a comprehensive but also pragmatic approach.

With ADVVISE SPM Quick Start, we support our customers in getting started with centralized, simple, yet cross-thematic processes within just six weeks. These can then be successively extended in line with the customer’s own organizational learning curve. The focus on proven processes with a few selected KPIs enables companies to easily get started with strategic project portfolio management, which is an important success factor in creating positive momentum for the upcoming long-term change process.

We can show you in a live demo how you can use ServiceNow SPM to introduce strategic resource management in your company in a compact and plannable way. Our expert will advise you methodically and comprehensively so that you will definitely achieve your strategic portfolio management goals.