- Project phases were found to be a meaningful way of understanding project competencies.
- The importance of people profiling:
A project starts with visioning. We need to vision a Master Plan, of say a Steel Melting Plant – the technology, capacity, etc. Once that is done, the technical specifications are known. Once the technical specifications are known, some building blocks will need to be bought out, some will need to be built in-house. This is according to the phases. So phases help understand the project competencies.
Example: Product engineering – The people who do the first phase have a different level of expertise, different profile, and their products are different. They are future-facing, while the specifications people are involved in detailing. This will need a different profile of people.
If there are visioning outcomes, there is one set of people who can do it well. Specification has a different mindset. Build has a third kind of mindset. Similarly, IP creation comes from a specification mindset, but it is a separate capability. Not everybody can vision, not everybody can build specifications, and similarly not everybody can do builds. When people are moved, do we see if they have functional expertise or also their orientation?
- The importance of capacity assessment based on capacity to deliver various products:
- Often the challenge is that there is a constant stress on the leadership and a small group of very competent people to deliver across the board. To turn this around, how do we build capacity to deliver more effectively in a wider group and be able to assess capacity of a group better?
- If capacity building can be in terms of groups who can accomplish 1-2 tasks (deliverables) then capacity assessment is not based on number of people, but number of people who can deliver ‘xyz’.
Example 1: Resource planning will ask, how much ‘master plan detailing’ (deliverable) you need to do in a year, or how many man-months of detailing is required.
Example 2: Creating a Staffing Plan is a deliverable from HR that will be needed across projects. So, the question HR will ask is, do we have a pool of people who can deliver staffing plans? The team can be trained and capability can be built in a focused manner for it.Once that is done, HR will have built the ‘staffing plan’ capability and will know how many such jobs they can handle.
Therefore, if we need to do resourcing from the point of view of delivering for the project, we need to know 2 things: i) the list of deliverables and ii) our current capability to deliver.