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Unburden your team and meet deadlines with confidence

Do you have a great team of smart people who are all good at what they do, and everyone is working really hard, but you still have late projects?  You’re not alone. 

Most organizations suspect their resources are overloaded but don’t know how to fix it without hiring a bunch of additional people. Fortunately, with the right knowledge and tools, that’s not necessary.

A Gantt chart-style project timeline showing sequential tasks for building a prototype, including layout, review, incorporating changes, getting quotes, ordering parts, and assembly. Each task is color-coded and assigned to specific team members (John, Ken, Mary). A highlighted task card on the right shows a task scheduled for 6:00 labeled "Get Prototype Quotes" in a pink box.

Why accurate resource loading matters

It may surprise you, but a modest increase of just 10% in resource loading can dramatically extend project durations—sometimes doubling the time required for completion. There is a detailed description of the math in this blog, but the graph of cycle time as a function of resource loading looks like the image to the right.

You can see that a small change in loading at the right end of the curve greatly impacts cycle time. Yet, most companies have their resources loaded at over 80% capacity utilization and wonder why everything takes so long. 

Without this knowledge and a system to accurately assess the workload across projects and departments the natural tendency is to load resources beyond the point of maximum productivity.

A scatter plot with error bars showing multiple data points grouped into five vertical clusters along the x-axis. Each cluster consists of several diamond-shaped blue markers with vertical lines representing variability or uncertainty. The graph has labeled axes, but the specific axis titles and numerical values are not clearly visible. The data appears to be comparing grouped outcomes with increasing variability across groups.

How can you fix overloaded resources?

One option is to put a project or two on hold. That would reduce the load across the board and allow everyone to catch up. But unless you’re a very senior manager, that’s hard to do and is a rather blunt response. Fortunately, Playbook has three features that are much more surgical and can be applied without drastic changes:

A smiling man with glasses and a beard is using a laptop. Around him are colorful visual elements representing workflow or task management, including labeled boxes such as “Submit Next Year’s Budget” (in pink) and “Document/Distribute FEA Results” (in yellow), and a flowchart above his head showing connected pink, yellow, and orange boxes with arrows.

  • Effort-based durations

    Most PM tools only use the task duration (in number of days) to create an outline of the schedule. But the duration of a task depends on two things: the total amount of working time it will take (the “effort”), and how much time the person has available each day to do the work. Without knowing both of these elements, the duration of a task is just an inaccurate guess.

  • Loading by availability

    Most companies allocate their resources to projects based on an eight-hour day. But it’s very difficult to get eight hours of work done in eight hours—and certainly not sustainable. It’s much more accurate to base duration estimates on the time the resource has available to spend on project tasks. For many resources, this is much less than eight hours per day. And if you understand the graph above, you can see that cycle time will be much higher if the actual loading is higher than what you think it is. 

    That’s why it’s imperative to use a tool that bases resource loading on actual availability

  • Loading by criticality

    When resources are overloaded, everyone has a long list of tasks they can work on each day. But only a few of them in all those combined lists are actually delaying the project on any given day—the tasks on the critical path. So it’s imperative to know exactly what those are. 

    And in projects with a lot of complexity, the critical path changes frequently, so it’s also important to know which tasks are near the critical path or have a small amount of slack. 

    The rest of the tasks in the project are important, but they have enough slack that they won’t affect the end date unless they get delayed enough to use all of their buffer. And Playbook will tell you long before that happens.

    Without the ability to see the loading based on the criticality of the tasks, the loading reports are essentially meaningless and possibly even misleading.

Additional Key Points

The end result of overloaded resources
The ultimate impact of overloaded resources is poor financial performance, which is caused by the high cost of delay of late projects. It also causes low morale. People don’t like working hard all the time and not having something to show for it.
The first sign of overloaded resources
The first thing you’ll notice is that everyone is multitasking and status updates are hard to get. The multitasking is initially caused by incorrect priorities coming from inaccurate and/or out-of-date plans. So people are working on the wrong things at the wrong time and small deadlines are missed, which causes people to multitask more, making everything take longer. It’s a self-reinforcing loop.
The root cause of overloaded resources
The root cause is a combination of not understanding how much overloading impacts the velocity of work and being unable to measure it. All high-performing systems with variability must have spare capacity, but for some reason it’s a common misperception that spare capacity is a waste of money.
Predictable end dates
A single resource may be the systemic root cause of multiple late projects. When a company has accurate resource loading of the tasks on the critical path, it becomes clear which resources are truly critical and for how long. 

See how one company finished their first-ever project on time after finding out one resource was critical on three projects at the same time.

Want to meet deadlines confidently?

Watch the demo or schedule a call to see accurate resource loading in action.

 

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