Project Intake with Prioritization and Resource Forecast

Project Intake and Resource Management are two of the most common needs related to project and portfolio management, and often they go hand in hand.

There are many good reasons to manage intake of work into the organization, including ensuring that we’re doing the right work (strategic alignment), getting the biggest bang for our buck (budget/ROI), and setting realistic expectations for what can be accomplished with the people available (resource management).

Most organizations actively manage their ‘Approved Projects’. Those are the ones that have been approved, funded, and staffed, whether through a formal process or not. Most organizations DO NOT actively manage their ‘Proposed Projects’ (business cases), which means that work just happens, and projects just start without being officially approved, funded, and staffed. That’s probably one of the biggest reasons that 65% of all projects fail. They weren’t set up to succeed to begin with.

Introducing a formal intake process is not actually that hard; but it does require good discipline as well as a standardized business case and a standardized prioritization process. That is what will allow us to evaluate competing investments or ‘compare apples to apples’. And, in some cases, a good intake process will also allow us to ‘compare apples to oranges’, meaning choosing between initiatives that are not similar in nature, but funded out of the same budget and utilizing the same pool of resources.

The Business Case as the foundation for intake

A good, standardized business case format captures enough information to allow the approvers to evaluate the various initiatives, so the degree of detail will vary greatly depending on the volume of initiatives being evaluated and the size of the investment for each. We typically see the below elements, but not always all of them and often in different combinations (see details in the video):

• Business Case Details – background information, problem statement, business benefits, target dates, location, investment category.
• Financials – high-level budget and sometimes more detailed planned spending.
• Scoring – an evaluation of how the business case aligns to the impact areas that are important to the organization; examples include relative investment, organizational impact, organizational risk, and strategic alignment. The score here is what enables the apples to apples/oranges comparisons.
• Resources – a high level estimate of what roles will be needed for the project and the relative effort (hours/FTE/%).
• Deliverables – could be standard contract deliverables, major outcomes, or documents.
• Risks – identifies any known risks up front.
• Decisions – captures any decisions that will need to be made as part of the project.
• Benefits – captures any benefits that we will want to track as part of (or often after) the project. If tangible benefit, it may include the planned value over time for tracking purposes.

Evaluating Business Cases against a standard process

Having an agreed-upon, standardized process for evaluating new business cases helps reduce the subjectivity and emotions that are often involved in choosing what work to take on. A good process should provide visibility into everything that’s being evaluated, including the details about what the work is; when it is proposed to be delivered; what resources are needed; how much it will cost; and relative priority compared to other initiatives. Your steering committee will then be able to go through a review that often looks something like this (see details in the video):

• Business Case Overview – an inventory of all the proposed initiatives for visibility.
• Business Case Timelines – a visual representation of when each business case is proposed to be delivered.
• Resource Demand – a summary of all the resource needs by role and by initiative.
• Business Case Scoring – a prioritized list of the business cases based on their scores against the pre-determined impact areas for the business.
• Business Case Prioritization – a prioritized view of which business cases are the best fit based on a limited budget and a minimum score value.
• Resource Forecast – a forward-looking view of what resources are needed to deliver on the work from the incoming business cases while still considering work already committed to from active, in-flight projects.

Approving Business Cases and allocating resources

Once the right business cases have been selected, it’s time to get them approved and allocate the resources who will do the work. Once this is done, the new projects will start to show up in the dashboards, reports, and view for ‘Approved Projects’, and the real work can begin.