Project Resource Allocation Using Data Analysis

47 projects. 3 days. 1 decisive outcome. $50M saved. A client brought us in to evaluate their entire development pipeline. The challenge: Limited resources, unlimited ideas, and no clear way to choose winners. The process: - Evaluated each project against underserved customer outcomes - Scored initiatives on their ability to deliver customer value - Identified projects addressing overserved or irrelevant outcomes - Optimized high-priority initiatives for cost, effort, and risk The results: - 12 projects immediately accelerated with additional resources - 23 projects reconsidered or abandoned - 12 projects optimized to deliver more customer value - Estimated $50M saved in misdirected development costs The transformation: From a scattered approach, hoping something would work, to a focused strategy targeting known opportunities. When you know precisely which customer outcomes are underserved, resource allocation becomes strategic instead of political. How much development effort could your organization redirect toward higher-value opportunities?

🔧 Prioritizing and Measuring Our Engineering Investments: Ensuring Maximum Impact 🔧 In the SaaS industry, effective allocation of engineering resources is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction. At Emplifi, we've implemented a detailed framework to track and prioritize our engineering investments, ensuring our efforts align with strategic goals and deliver tangible value to our clients. 📊 Investment Measurement: We meticulously utilize JIRA data to track our engineering investments. Our work is categorized into initiatives, epics, and user stories, each assigned to a specific investment category. These categories include: • Roadmap: New features, functionality, and product improvements with direct business impact. • Technical Debt: Work required to pay off technical debt and enhance long-term maintainability. • Maintenance: Triaging, investigating, and resolving bugs or technical issues. • Customer Support: Custom work for clients, addressing support requests and maintaining client expectations. • Internal Development: Projects to improve internal processes, platform architecture, and overall work efficiency. 📈 Data-Driven Decision Making: In the last six months, we have, on average, invested 60% of our development capacity into roadmap development, which is on par with the best-in-class engineering teams (https://lnkd.in/erFBTjzT). This is all real-time data coming from JIRA and visualized in our in-house tool, Unified Analytics. This level of detail allows our finance department to calculate ROI on product developments and determine total capitalized development costs. At Emplifi, we are committed to excellence in everything we do, and our meticulous approach to investment measurement is a key part of achieving this. 📸 This text includes a screenshot showing the investment allocation by sprint over the last six months. 🔍 Question for You: How are your teams investing and spending their time? I would love to know more about your time allocation and priorities. Share your insights and experiences in the comments below! #Engineering 🚀 #SaaS 💻 #CustomerExperience ❤️ #ProductDevelopment 🛠️ #InvestmentStrategy 📊 #DataDriven

🔔 Bench activity (idle time and associated cost) 🔔 One of the standout features of Spider Project is its 'bench activity' function. When a resource is required, it is automatically assigned to an activity at the point it is most needed. However, if there is no work available for the resource, the project still needs to cover the cost of this resource. In such cases, the resource is AUTOMATICALLY placed into a "bench activity." This functionality allows for the easy calculation of idle time and associated costs for each resource type or specific skill. The project simulation model also displays the "idle quantity". It helps determine the minimum required resource quantities. #ResourceSmoothing in practice! It takes seconds to set bench activities. The rest is done automatically. A particularly valuable feature is using bench activities in quantitative risk analysis! If a project develops a stochastic model (including risks and uncertainties) and runs a Monte Carlo Analysis, the model reveals the likelihood that additional resources of a specific type might be needed. Monte Carlo is a built-in feature in Spider Project, so finding an answer takes minutes. No import /export or additional tool is needed. For instance, a deterministic model might indicate that three resources with particular skills are constantly sitting idle on the bench. Theoretically, the resource quantity can be reduced without affecting the project’s committed date. However, Monte Carlo Analysis might show that there is a certain chance that only one resource will remain idle. This empowers the project team to make a data-driven decision. They can evaluate whether to mitigate the risk of delays by adding extra resources, knowing the CALCULATED probability of such an event (more resources are needed) and the CALCULATED cost of the mitigation action. Such decisions are very important as they impact benefits and reputation. #planningandscheduling #projectengineer #MCS #PredAptivePM #Primavera

STEAL THIS!! Week 10! S10. Managing your project pipeline and resource forecasting [Note: This is a series to share HRUR - How Rocketlane Uses Rocketlane. So you can borrow from our ideas and configurations!] Knowing which deals are about to close and budgeting your delivery resources for the future can help relieve the stress of having to frantically look for the right resources when a new project suddenly comes in. It will also help you understand if you need to hire new resources or give a partner the heads up ahead of new incoming projects! Here’s how we do this at Rocketlane: Leveraging Rocketlane’s native integrations with our CRM, we specify conditions at the CRM level to create projects in Rocketlane automatically when the deal reaches the negotiation stage. We also set up sync at the field level to maintain consistent data across Rocketlane and the CRM. Choose a stage before the "closed won" stage helps us - we have 2-3 weeks left for closing. Our recommendation would be to use the stage where the probability of deal closure is 80% or above. Here is a breakdown of the pre-requisites that you’ll need to have in place: - Your CRM integrated with Rocketlane to automatically create projects and sync fields. Rocketlane provides Out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot, but integration with any CRM is possible using APIs with the workflow/automation modules on both systems, or through Zapier and Workato! - Placeholders and Resource Allocations at the Project Template level. Specify the different personas involved in your project, and the typical hours/day allocation corresponding to each placeholder. Rocketlane also has an ‘Auto-allocate’ feature that creates these allocations for you automatically based on the ‘Effort’ hours recorded on the template tasks. - Sync the ‘Deal/Opportunity Stage’ field with an identical custom project field created in Rocketlane.  This needs to be in place so you can filter out Projects in the pipeline vs. Projects that are Won and ready to kick-off. We can also use this field to run a ‘Scheduled automation’ on Rocketlane to check for ‘Closed-Lost’ projects every day and automatically archive those projects so they move out of the resourcing view and free up your resource availability. When the probable projects start flowing in, you can view them on the ‘Resource Management’ tab to understand your pipeline. If you are using ‘Soft allocations’, you can also substitute the placeholders with actual users based on their current availability. On the ‘Capacity Planning’ tab, you’ll be able to view the demand vs. supply for each persona and plan for the future accordingly! Check out the screenshots below for examples. Feel free to let us know if you’re interested in setting this up for your Rocketlane account, and someone from our team will be happy to help you out!