2 AVAILABILITY OF RESOURCES

Staffing plan

Generate a staffing plan showing:

Types of people required
Number of each type required
When the different people will be required

Calculate the manpower available to the project

Typically, apart from your project, the members of your team will spend their time in a number of other areas:

Definite other projects in which they are involved.
Vaguer, support/maintenance/quality/other request sorts of things which take up a definite chunk of time every week.
Annual leave, public holidays.
Unpredictable things which can't be anticipated. Sick leave comes under this heading.

The first three things can all be quantified , while some assumption can be made about the last point thereby quantifying it.

Steps to take

Work out for each person how much of their time (measured in days per week, hours per day or any other measure that means something to you) is being spent on these activities and hence how much time (measured in the same units) is available for your project.
Document each person's availability in your project plan and your PC-based project planning tool if you are using one.

3 THE PROJECT MODEL

Use the WBS and manpower availability to build a project model

Steps to take

Now match people to jobs. Wherever possible try to ensure that there is only one resource per task. Ensure that, as far as possible, every job has a human being's name as opposed to an organization or a "TBD" or "ANO" against it.
- Ensure that, as far as is possible, you have used each person's time available to the project exactly no more, no less.
- If you are using a PC-based tool, use it to assign people to jobs. The tool will now draw a Gantt chart of your project for you. Among dozens, if not hundreds of useful things, the tool will show you your project's critical path .
- Failing this you will have to draw the Gantt chart yourself manually. If you are doing this, be warned that the manual approach will almost certainly introduce errors. The Gantt chart is a model of how your project may unfold over time.

4 BUILD IN CONTINGENCY

Use the First Law of Project Management to build in a margin for error

You have built a model of your project, either on your PC or on paper, and this model tells you how you believe your project will unfold once it gets on the road.

You could imagine, at this point, that you know things like the end date, the number of people required, the budget, and so on. However, you don't. The model you have created is exactly that: a model. It is a prediction of how the future may turn out.

Before you start making commitments based on the model you need to ask yourself one vital question. "What will I do if the model is wrong what will I do if it doesn't work out like I thought?"

A margin for error can be achieved by looking at the four parameters upon which the First Law of Project Management is based.

Just to remind ourselves , these are:

Functionality what is to be delivered
Delivery date when it is to be delivered
Effort the amount of work involved in delivering it
Quality the quality of what is delivered

The First Law of Project Management states that there is a function which connects these four variables , and that this function is a constant, i.e.

Function (functionality, delivery date, effort, quality) = Constant

Thus, if one of these variables changes, the others change so that the overall equation remains the same.

We are all familiar with this effect. Shorten the delivery date, for example, and (a) functionality must decrease, (b) effort must increase, or (c) quality must decrease.

Steps to take

To achieve a margin for error and a fallback position, examine your project using these four parameters as a basis. You can examine your project at three different levels, each requiring progressively more effort on your part. These levels are:
- overall (i.e. treating the entire project as one large job)
- critical path jobs
- all jobs.
At each level, you examine the relevant job(s) and ask yourself the following questions:
- What happens if the job runs over? (Elapsed time)
  
  Can the job be shortened ? (Elapsed time)
- What happens if the job is bigger than we estimated? (Effort)
  
  What would be the effect of adding more people? (Effort)
- Is this job doing something which is crucial to the project? If not, could it be put into a later delivery? (Functionality)
- What happens if this job isn't done perfectly ? (Quality)
Based on the answers you should modify the estimates of effort and/or elapsed time for some or all jobs.
Alternatively, you could add in a figure of, say, 15 percent to cover contingency. Add this to all effort estimates and this will automatically be reflected in extended deadlines and delivery dates.