This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
At one point, euphemistically referring to troops as "resources," McChrystal writes, "Resources will not win the war, but under-resourcing could lose it." Another way to reads this sentence is: Under-resourcing could lose the war, but more resources won't necessarily win it, either.
Ever think of Capacity Planning in terms of what your Project Management team can handle?
[...] Utilizing Capacity Planning in the PMO would help to optimize resources, and review a PM team's opportunities to take on another project. The ability to check a PM's capacity would enable management to accurately predict the prioritized projects of each PM. Each PM would report their capacity %, and enable project prioritization...
While Christian is headed in the right direction here, trying to support prioritization and to avoid overloading the system with more projects than it can handle, my sense tells me that his implied acceptance of project managers as the limiting factor is misguided.
Any organization sophisticated enough to be involved with PMO efforts should also be sophisticated enough to be conscious of and manage its constraints with some common sense. Any organization that lets the availability of such a generic skill as project management constrain its ability to launch valuable projects is unnecessarily hobbling itself.
The basis for the TOC approach to multi-project management is that to avoid to pressures to multi-task and then suffer its debilitating effects, you launch prioritized projects based on the availability of some skill that is commonly used, heavily used across the project portfolio. While, on the surface, PM skills fit this definition, the only reason to live with a constraint -- a limit on project throughput -- is difficulty in acquiring more of that skill. If you limit your throughput to that that the PMs can handle, then you are living with a strategy that says that PMs are the reason you are in business. Rather than rely on such a generic strategic constraint -- one that can be easily copied by the competition -- the system should be managed around a constraining resource that more directly reflects the core, differentiating competency of they system/organization -- its true strategic constraint.
Do you want your project throughput to be limited by lack of PMs or do you want to use your PMs and PM processes to maximize the capacity of scarce, valuable skilled resources that reflects the real value of your projects' products?
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