Resource Management Best Practices in Microsoft PPM

Resource Capacity/Demand Management is not only a core capability of Microsoft PPM; it is also one of the biggest pain points for organizations AND the most requested feature.

At Sensei, we recommend a best practices approach to resource management; where long term planning is done with generic roles in a high-level resource plan. Think of this as your “resource budget” for the project. You might ask for 3 developers for 5 months or a project manager at 50% and so on. Then, when your project is approved, you will build out a detailed schedule with assignments for named individuals.

From a reporting perspective, we have different needs depending on the horizon we’re looking at. In the very near term, resource managers need to identify resource conflicts across active projects. In the medium term, we want to understand and review all the approved allocations of resources. And, in the longer term, we want to identify resource demand and bottlenecks.