Project Management Framework
Planning - Staffing Plan
Definition
The Staffing Plan defines the required human resources needed to deliver the desired project deliverables. It involves the selection and assignment of a Project Team. The Staffing Plan must provide the appropriate skill sets to manage the project and to perform the tasks that produce the specified project deliverables. It also needs to provide for any additional non-labor resources such as tools, equipment, or processes used by the project team.
Why is this important?
It's important for a project to accomplish its objectives as efficiently as possible. This requires a project manager to skillfully allocate resources. Once a project's scope is defined, the management decisions relating to project resource assignments usually are the single most important factor in ensuring a project's ultimate successful outcome.
Instructions
Staff planning breaks down into a few simple processes:
A staff planner must first determine what is in the potentially available
resource pool. This can be existing staff, potential new staff, contracted for services, and/or potential tools that augment the capacities of people. It is critical that a staff planner know the organization's structure in order to determine where available resources can be found.
Secondly, the staff planner must determine the skill sets needed to execute the tasks defined in the Project Schedule and Task Plan. This
skills assessment shows what skills are needed from the potential resource pool. If needed skills are not available in the resource pool, the staff planner must make the project sponsors and/or the project manager aware of the deficiency so that they can obtain them. It is often the case that needed staff are already committed to other activities. Getting staff re-directed toward a project often requires extensive "negotiation" with whoever currently manages the needed resource.
Thirdly, the staff planner must ensure that the right people, with the right skills, are available at the right time. Basically this means aligning the staff availability with the Project Schedule and Task Plan. Generally a project
staffing profile is done at this stage that shows the composition of the project team at any given point in the project's life cycle. For instance, at the start of a project, planners and project managers might constitute the entire team. In the middle of the project, the team may consist mainly of designers and developers. At the end of a project, trainers or quality assurance evaluators may dominate the team.
Finally, the staff planner needs to define roles and responsibilities for the project. By clearly defining the roles and responsibilities in a project the staff planner defines lines of authority, control, communication, and coordination. Without these definitions projects often dissolve into chaos. This process organizes the project resources into a
Project Team. Project Teams are generally organized along managerial hierarchy and functional line of business. Teams may break down to sub-teams depending on the project's complexity and size. Typically project Teams are represented on
Project Organizational Charts.
The primary focus of a staff plan is people but it's also important to plan for the
non-labor resources needed to support the project team. Generally this includes things like facility, equipment, software, etc. The staff plan does not deal with acquisitions defined as project deliverables (see Investment Plan) but it does need to define the resources needed to enable the project team to produce those deliverables. For example, a project team may need a special co-located facility or special testing hardware in order to deliver a complex software system or a sophisticated network.
How to Scale
Large, complex projects require more staff planning discipline than small projects.
Their scale creates the probability that staff estimation may be incorrect and this introduces risk that
can only be mitigated through careful staff planning. A common tactic to combat this risk is to decompose
the required staff into sub-teams or project sub-functions in order to isolate any potential planning
miscalculation.
Related Links:
Staffing Plan Template
Staffing Plan Execution
Checklists