Not able to identify how many people you need to develop a project?

If you struggle with this kind of situation, this post is for you.

Problem: How to assign the right number of people needed to develop a project is a problem that small, medium and big design companies face in almost every project. It is a far more recurrent problem than people imagine and, for sure, it does not exist only in your company.

This task is a very defying one, because we have one of two paths to take: (1) Estimate based on quantities from a similar project previously done, or (2) try to establish a tentative distribution of working time by guessing how much work the various kind of skills needed should produce and linking this guess with the available resources in your company.

Consequence: This guessing, combined with the lack of trust-able information on the actual performance of your teamwork, can lead to treacherous situations, jeopardizing the cost and time planning of the project and putting your relation with the client at great risk. Not to mention the increased risk of losses by overtimes and disarrangement in the cash flow.

When the development of the project is approaching any of the milestones and the corresponding project stages are not ready, the natural action of the PM is to ask the team to work overtime and/or engage people currently assigned to other projects in the team to try to meet the milestones. This is a possible lose-lose situation: the costs will go up and other projects will be impaired by the reduction in their work team.

Solution: Keeping trustworthy records of how your team performs, indexed by projects types and complexity, is the first step. These records should be kept up-to-date and be as accurate as possible.

For each new project, create an estimate of the workforce needed, based on these records, and break it into each delivery of the project contract. Subdivide the stages in as many single tasks as it would be effective to ease project development check and follow-up.

As project development takes place, update and analyze the planned x executed relation of workforce hours’ consumption, and act promptly per the evolution of this relationship, mitigating the eventual loss with the project.

This will avoid last minute decisions, making the managing of project development more agile, efficient and productive.

How Can Crunchflow Help? We have an estimating time consumption platform that facilitates the subdivision of the work in deliverable and tasks and allows for a quick estimation of your planned workforce utilization.

The same platform gives you the ability to allocate resources and check for their performance in every task they finish. The projects, deadlines and resources automatic integration gets you a fast and effective view of the numbers on the project costs and revenues.

And of course, the best way to improve your process is measuring its results and setting up challenging goals to be achieved by your team. And this can be easily done in our embedded Analytics Solution, that you can share with your team and clients.

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