From running the business to growing the business

According to a 2012 Gartner report across various industries, over 60 percent of IT spend is invested in running the business versus only a little over 30 percent in growing or transforming the business. As companies struggle to be more innovative, it’s imperative to shift IT resources from sustaining work to strategic projects. With personnel taking up over 40 percent of IT spending, effective resource management becomes a critical competency for IT organizations of any size.

In addition to prioritizing IT projects that contribute the most value to the business, IT organizations need to apply effective ways to better manage their limited resources. Most IT organizations simply don’t have enough people to do everything they think they need or want to do. The secret to actually getting projects done, both effectively and efficiently, is to balance available project resources with demand.

Effective allocation of IT resources

Resource management is defined as the efficient and effective deployment of an organization’s resources when they are needed. Such resources may include financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology (IT). Specifically, IT organizations need to apply resource management to meet the growing demand for IT projects with appropriate and effective resource allocation, i.e. assigning the right personnel to the right projects based on their skills set, experience, availability, current/future workload, and costs.

The proper allocation of the right resources can have significant benefits for IT organizations in terms of cost savings and project execution (see left sidebox for details). Transforming your IT operations to become more efficient and effective cannot be achieved without effective resource management.

Steps to Successful Resource Management

1. Capacity Planning

Effective resource management has to be built on a strong foundation — capacity planning. It starts with calculating the ‘true capacity’:

True Capacity = Overall Hours Available – (Holidays + Administrative Time) – Out of Office

This requires capturing key resource profile data, including: type of resource (full-time, part-time, contractor), business unit/department, resource role, capacity per resource and skills and experience.

Resource Management

Cloud Solutions for IT Management

SOLUTION BRIEF

• Productive alignment of IT resource capabilities and availability with project demand

• Shifting project resources from running the business to growth and transformative projects

• Greater visibility across resource demand and supply avoiding shortages or other challenges

• Analyze current utilization of resources and immediately revise utilization based on business needs

Benefits of Resource Management

What-If Scenario Planner

Capacity/Demand Planner

Innotas111 Sutter Street, Suite 300San Francisco, CA 94104Tel: +1.415.263.9800Toll-free: 1.866.692.7362www.innotas.com - info@innotas.com

About Innotas: Innotas provides a ground-breaking cloud-based IT Governance solution—an easy-to-use, rapid-to-deploy and cost-effective way to manage resources and budgets across an IT department’s entire inventory of projects, portfolios, applications, assets and service requests. With its strong foundation in Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management, Innotas provides CIOs and IT management with visibility across both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations for improved decision making across the entire IT portfolio.

Cloud Solutions for IT Management

• Comprehensive Resource profiles, including skill profiles

• Resource, corporate and individual calendars

• Top-down resource planning across all demand

• Resource search capability ensuring the matching of resource needs with the right resource

• Resource staffing requests for more centralized Resource Staffing

• Detailed resource assignments against tasks and work items

• Detailed resource assignment reports

• Capacity and demand reports by resource and role

• What-If Resource Optimization Scenario Planner

Resource Management Functionality:

“Our Executive Director of Technology Services didn’t realize how over allocated his group was

until he started entering information into Innotas.”

- Executive Director PMO

WellStar Health System

Copyright ©2012, Innotas. All rights reserved. Innotas is a trademark of Innotas, a California company. Other names used herein may be trade-marks of their respective owners. Innotas_DS_ResourceMgmt_2012-03-19

2. Demand Planning

In the next step, IT departments need to determine their ‘true workload’ in order to understand the demand that your projects will put on your ‘true capacity’ (demand planning):

True Workload = Project Work + Operational Work

It starts with identifying your project work, i.e. work that has a specific start and end date as well as defined and specific objectives. Next, you need to determine the amount of work that is spent on operational or administrative activities.

3. Resource Optimization

Last but not least, capacity and demand planning need to be aligned through constant resource optimization, meaning your capacity and demand cannot be set once and then ignored, but need to be reviewed and adjusted, based on new incoming demand and changes in capacity.

Achieving Resource Management Success

The Innotas Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution provides a comprehensive set of tools and features that supports each stage of the resource management process, including ongoing optimization. In addition to its other core competencies in Project Portfolio Management and IT Governance, Innotas resource management provides the foundation for accomplishing the activities that are necessary in order to achieve success in resource management.

As a benefit of the rich functionality that Innotas provides in resource management, IT organizations can successfully achieve robust resource planning and allocation across their entire workload. This improved assignment of resources across all work delivers greater visibility of resource availability in Innotas resource management dashboards and reporting. Through the optimization of resources via scenario planning, IT organizations are able to reign in on any unnecessary resource assignments, and ensure their resources are working on the right projects.

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