Achieve the next level of Collaboration: Resource Sharing

All organizations have gone through at some point in time – or are undergoing – a complex transformation. Navigating such a transformation in the current BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) context requires organizations to be at the top of their game to survive. According to this most recent definition, Brittle characterizes an environment with high levels of dependency in which the failure or revision of a previously accepted assumption can have a ripple effect. Therefore, organizations should be cautious about the way they plan and manage their resources.

To avoid collapse, as the environment continuously changes, so must organizations. Leaders all over the world are struggling with an increasing demand to keep reinventing and innovating their businesses. To be successful, complex transformations need the cross-cutting commitment of all departments, and this is where most fail. We often see organizations operating in conflicted environments, with little to no information sharing, siloed teams, and self-centered decision making, ultimately resulting in low-value creation. In such conditions, leaders manage multiple, isolated resource pools, with no resource sharing across the entire organization. As a result, they often experience resource scarcity and, consequently, delays in the transformation initiatives.

All the difficulties associated with the current Brittle environment, caused by internal and/or external factors, force organizations to rapidly reprioritize and adapt business plans according to the most recent strategic direction and goals. In turn, this creates, among other things, the need for an optimized use of the resource pool.

According to Robert Handler's analysis in his Gartner's article, "Portfolio and resource managers claim to have resource management, but they are unable to escape the vicious cycle of too much work with too few resources, causing thinly time-sliced resources and falling further behind each day”. For instance, leaders often make the mistake of underestimating the necessary capacity, which will inevitably force a delay on one or more initiatives. In turn, successive delays might result in increased costs for their organizations, especially when dealing with large teams or specialized resources, which have higher price tags.

As Robert Handler and Mbula Schoen stated in their Gartner's article, "Balancing available resources against demand for those resources is essential to successful initiative completion”. Again, this is especially important for scarce, specialized resources. With limited resource capacity, leaders often struggle to optimize the use of their resource pool in order to ensure initiatives meet their requirements on time and on budget. Bottlenecks must be avoided and their BAU activities secured.

In the current environment, the ultimate goal for organizations is the creation of an optimized plan for resource allocation that looks at the entire resource pool. Such a dynamic plan is essential to ensure an effective response even to last-minute changes such as unexpected resource shortages. This resource pool optimization, along with the growing demand for fast-paced delivery, requires timely and informed decisions. To achieve those, leaders must nurture transparency, full disclosure of information, a high degree of interoperability, and delegated decision-making across the entire organization.

With greater transparency driving a more effortless and broader information sharing between different initiatives and departments, it is now time for leaders to stop planning only according to the needs of their own siloed initiatives and start looking at the bigger picture. It is time to drop the fences and look above and beyond their own initiatives if they want to move to the next level of resource management. More importantly, this closest collaboration between initiatives and departments will allow not only information sharing, but also resource sharing.

To effectively achieve such a level of resource sharing, however, leaders must foster an interchangeability predisposition that allows their team members to be open to and become an actual "shareable resource". Without proper change management and the right attitude, people can become one of the biggest obstacles to organizational change. Thus, it is up to the leaders to "acculturate” them into this new, more collaborative mindset. People in organizations must be available and willing to collaborate on different fronts, according to defined priorities – which can change at any time! After making this shift, leaders will no longer consider multiple, isolated – and often scarce – resource pools, but rather a single, broader resource pool shared at a cross-organizational level. Such collaborative resource sharing will significantly optimize the use of the resource pool, making it more straightforward to respond adequately to changes in resource allocation across the entire organization.

Every leader knows that managing a resource pool can be a nightmare, full of never-ending, daunting tasks. If that wasn't enough, leaders are often resigned to the old habits of doing it manually – using the "macro powered" excel sheet. This is a tremendously challenging process with simply too many free variables at stake for it to be considered suitable for manual processing. If done manually, leaders are likely to find themselves in a cycle of repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks, reaching either an already outdated or an over-simplified solution, with no practical application in the current context, thus generating conflicting allocation scenarios.

Efficient resource management requires leaders to:

The solution to navigate complexity is to share resources between initiatives and departments. However, this sharing will create additional challenges. Here is where technology can act as an enabler via the automation of repetitive tasks and allowing for multiple scenario-based analysis, considering initiatives’ priority, required skill sets, and resource availability. These capabilities will allow an optimal allocation scenario for each resource demand at a cross-organizational level, even when it comes to last-minute changes and resource scarcity. This way, not only human errors will be avoided, but also people in organizations will save time. The time that they can use to find the best solutions for any unexpected resource shortages. This level of agility will be the turning point from current practices. After making this transition, organizations will work with greater responsiveness and higher speed of action, hence reducing the potential negative impact on operations.

As past experiences – and mistakes – tell us, leaders tend to focus on the "now" and on responding only to the needs of their own siloed initiatives. This is making organizations fall far behind their strategic goals as Brittle environments prevent initiatives to create value on their own if not connected and working together. To avoid a collapse, it is essential that they start operating at a cross-organizational level.

Organizations need to focus on a resource allocation that looks at the entire resource pool instead of only to a subset of initiatives. Furthermore, leaders must replace the old habits of manual management of the resource pool with the advantages of dedicated technology. Most importantly, a closest collaboration between initiatives and departments will allow collaborative resource sharing, thus optimizing the use of the resource pool.

For all these reasons, more than ever before, it is of paramount importance for people in organizations to follow a journey towards a more collaborative environment that sets the path to high-value creation.

Now, the question one should be asking: is your organization ready to advance to the next level of resource management by embracing the collaborative journey?



References

1. Cascio, J. (2020). Facing the Age of Chaos. Medium.
2. Handler, R. (2018). Supercharge Your Resource Management to Support Advanced PPM Maturity. Gartner
3. Handler, R., Schoen, M. (2019). Resource Capacity Planning for PPM Leaders: Crawl Before You Walk. Gartner

Fábio Daniel Gonçalves, Head of R&D