Avoid A Time Sheet First Approach in PPM Tool Implementations
At first glance at this title, one might say … “that’s obvious, tell me something I don’t know”. Unfortunately, although this bit of ‘best practice guidance” has existed for over a decade, organizations still indicate the deployment of this method when implementing project and portfolio management tools. This approach typically leads to the delayed or partial implementation of tool functionality and suboptimized results, due to the following factors:
Existing uncertainty or lack of clarity of the problem to be addressed.
High degree of cultural resistance and mistrust within the organization.
Low process and tool maturity among the impacted users.
Existing uncertainty or lack of clarity of the problem to be addressed. The current PPM tool market is characterized by an abundance of vendors offering multiple PPM products. Many vendors provide numerous product options to cater to buyers within organizations of different sizes or varying user maturity levels. Resource management and capacity planning represents a primary category of functionality within many of the software products and support the following features:
Assignment of personnel to projects, programs, portfolios, etc., and reallocation of these resources as needed.
Ability to inventory skills by resource type and named resources.
Ability to forecast resource requirements, capacity shortages, and resource overallocations.
Performance of what if analysis to optimize resource deployment when there are shifts in strategy and/or initiative reprioritization.
Enable time reporting/time capture across initiatives.
Given this breadth of functionality, organizations must have a clear understanding of the business problems they are looking to solve and how the tools can support decision making. This is not only important for vendor/tool selection, but it is critical when determining the implementation sequencing for the selected PPM product. When making a selection, organizations will include a number of impacted stakeholders in the selection process, as a good practice. However, once these individuals witness the robust set of resource and capacity management features, they can easily lose focus on the core business problem(s). These stakeholders typically resort to what they deem as a “logical” first step to roll out time keeping functionality to enable the other features. Their premise is a need to obtain the actual data on who is working on what, when this type of information is not required to support the decision making enabled by the other functionality.
High degree of cultural resistance and mistrust within the organization. This factor can often be “the kiss of death” for organizations pursuing a time sheet first approach for implementing their PPM tool. This is particularly true in the current business environment plagued by fear of AI-lead staff reductions, economic uncertainty, and political unrest. Leading with time reporting functionality merely exacerbates paranoia and apprehension among impacted users. Organizations implementing PPM tools must have a keen understanding of the receptivity (or lack of) and sentiment across the enterprise regarding time reporting. The deployment of effective organization change management practices are critical for organizations leaning toward a time sheet first approach for implementing PPM tools and supporting user adoption.
Low process and tool maturity among the impacted users. Unfortunately, many technology buyers view the technology as the answer as opposed to an enabler. For example, it is very common to find articles that speak of the virtues of AI, while simultaneously stating how organizations are challenged to realize enterprise outcomes. When deploying PPM tools to address resource management and capacity planning, many organizations assume that capturing time via the tool will be the quick fix. The assumed “simplicity” of merely capturing time makes this an even more appealing option. Regrettably, in many cases, the implementation of time reporting is an organization’s first venture into this space, and supporting processes do not exist or are embryonic at best. Combine that with the introduction of a new tool, that may not be user friendly, and you have a recipe for an administrative and operational nightmare. When selecting a PPM tool, buyers must exercise self-awareness of their own process limitations and user maturity. They must perform the due diligence to go beyond the typical vendor heat maps and bubble chart presentations and understand other customers’ implementation and adoption experiences.