How To Enhance Your Product and Project Resource Management Approach

Shift from project-centric resource planning to adaptive product-centric models.

Whether you're a project manager, product manager, or resource manager, you face the ever-increasing demand for effective resource management. You're tasked with ensuring that you have the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, for the right projects and products. But that's not all. You also need to balance the supply and demand of resources, optimize their utilization, and measure their performance.

However, what if your projects and products aren't static but dynamic and evolving? What if you need to adapt to changing customer needs, market trends, and business goals? What if you need to deliver value faster and more frequently?

This is where a traditional resource management approach may fall short. To drive business growth in this environment, you need an agile resource management strategy tailored to the needs of product delivery that enables you to scale team capacity up and down. But transitioning from project-based to product-based resourcing is easier said than done. This article is here to guide you through improving your resource planning approach to be more adaptive and product-focused.

What is a product-centric resource management strategy?

According to Gartner, 80% of organizations consider their current resource management processes ineffective. Project managers often ask how to "fit projects in" to product models or how to "manage the demand from the business." One way to do this is by transitioning to product-centric delivery.^[1]

Product-centric resource management is a dynamic, agile approach to allocating talent and skills to product delivery work. It differs from traditional resource management in several key ways:

• A traditional resource management approach is based on projects, which are defined by scope, time, and cost. A product-centric strategy is based on products, which are defined by customer needs, market opportunities, and business outcomes.

• Product-centric resource management assigns resources to products based on their skills and preferences. Traditional resource management allocates resources to projects based on predefined roles and responsibilities and relies on upfront estimates made months before work begins.

• A traditional approach to resource management focuses on efficiency, which is measured by outputs like deliverables and milestones. In product-centric resource management, the focus is on effectiveness, which is measured by outcomes like value and impact.

Adopting a product-centric resource management strategy can help small and midsize businesses achieve more agility, innovation, and customer satisfaction. SMB's often face challenges such as limited resources, changing demands, and competitive pressures. By choosing a product-centric approach, SMB's can:

• Optimize their resource utilization by creating dedicated, dynamic product teams that can grow or shrink according to the value they deliver.

• Enhance their resource planning by considering the capacity forecasts for different types of work, such as routine, scheduled, and unscheduled activities.

• Improve their resource performance by tracking the progress and results of the work done by each individual and team.

In the rest of this article, you'll learn how to implement a product-centric resource management strategy in your organization. You will also discover how to overcome some of the common challenges and pitfalls that may arise during the transition.

Steps to improving your resource management approach

Moving to a product-centric approach requires changing both mindsets and processes related to resource management. Rather than a single overhaul, view it as an iterative journey of continuous improvement. Here are six steps to guide you as you adapt your resource strategy:

Step 1: Embrace a product-centric mindset

Traditionally, projects have been managed as discrete endeavors with defined start and end dates. However, in a product-centric approach, the focus shifts towards continuous product development, innovation, and your customers.

Start with the customer. Understand their problems, needs, desires, and feedback. Use data and insights to validate your assumptions and measure your outcomes. After all, you are building your products for them. Focus on the value and impact your products deliver to them, rather than the features or functionalities that they have.

Embrace the idea that your products aren't isolated entities but integral parts of an evolving product ecosystem. By viewing projects as ongoing contributions to a broader product vision, you can allocate resources strategically and prioritize long-term value creation.

Step 2: Identify highly demanded skill sets for projects and products

By understanding the specific skills and expertise needed for each objective, you can ensure that your resources are effectively allocated, maximizing productivity and project success. Here are some steps you can take to gain a better understanding of what skills are needed to complete your projects:

• Analyze historical data: Look at recent and current projects to identify what skills were most utilized and constrained.

• Conduct team interviews: Have current product teams share what capabilities they need more of or find scarce,

• Anticipate future trends: Look ahead at upcoming project and product roadmaps to predict what capabilities you will need to deliver on those priorities.

• Categorize by proficiency levels: Note specialized senior-level skills that may be bottlenecks, not just general capabilities.

• Maintain a dynamic skills matrix: Keep an updated register of in-demand skills and proficiency levels that can inform resourcing decisions. Use a resource management tool to help you identify and manage the skill sets needed for your projects.

Step 3: Curate your dynamic product team

You should form product teams that consist of diverse and complementary skill sets, and empower them with autonomy, accountability, and ownership of their products. By doing so, you can ensure that your product teams are agile, collaborative, and customer-centric. Here are some tips to help you accomplish that:

• Define roles and responsibilities: Determine the roles in your product team based on the skill sets and competencies required for your products. Consider both technical and non-technical roles, like product manager, product owner, engineer, designer, business analyst, tester, etc.

• Assign resources to your product team: Assign the resources that have the right skills and preferences to your product team, based on the availability and suitability of your resources. The step you just completed will provide you with this information.

• Empower your team: Give your product team the authority and responsibility to make decisions and deliver outcomes for their products. Give them clear goals and feedback while supporting them with the necessary resources and tools.

Step 4: Develop a product-centric resource management strategy

By adopting a strategy that revolves around your product, you can enhance resource allocation, improve project outcomes, and drive business success. This means adopting agile and lean practices that enable rapid delivery of value to customers and continuous improvement of your products. These tips will help you do that:

• Track product progress: A product management tool can help you create and track your product backlog, plan and execute your sprints or kanban boards, collaborate and communicate with your product team, and collect and analyze data and feedback.

• Track your resources: The same resource management software you used for creating a skills matrix will help you track the availability of your resources, assign them to products based on their skills, and identify skill gaps.

• Analyze product use: A product analytics tool can help you improve the performance and quality of your product.

Step 5: Foster collaboration and adaptability

Encourage your product teams to work together and share their ideas and insights. This will help them to respond more quickly with innovative solutions to changing customer needs and market conditions. You also want to collaborate with your customers and users, so that your product teams know how they need to adapt. The following can help you accomplish this:

• Create a collaborative environment: Leverage collaboration tools and technologies to facilitate remote collaboration, especially in remote work environments. Video conferencing, chat, document-sharing platforms, and virtual whiteboards can enhance teamwork and foster a sense of shared ownership.

• Encourage knowledge sharing: Urge team members to share their expertise, lessons learned, and best practices with others. Create forums for knowledge exchange, such as regular team meetings, internal workshops, or online wikis.

• Invest in continuous learning: Offer training programs, workshops, and certifications to team members so they can enhance their skills, knowledge, and adaptability.

Step 6: Continuously adapt and evolve

The needs of the market and your customers aren't static. Neither are your competitor's products. To stay ahead in this dynamic business environment, you and your team need to embrace a mindset of continuous improvement. Here are some ways you can do that:

• Gather feedback: Regularly collect feedback from your teams on what's working and what's not related to resource allocation. Collect feedback from customers to determine the same about your products.

• Analyze data: Monitor and evaluate the OKRs or KPIs of your products and resources to measure and compare their progress and impact.

• Course correct quickly: Use the insights gathered from your data to apply the lessons you learned to future products and resources either to avoid repeating mistakes or to replicate practices that worked.

Moving forward with product-centric resource management

Improving your resource management approach is essential to unlocking your organization's agility and product delivery potential. By shifting to a product-centric model, you can move from rigid allocations to dynamic skill-based staffing that scales up and down with demand.

Here we have outlined key steps to guide your resource strategy transformation that include adopting an agile, business-aligned mindset, curating cross-functional product teams, developing flexible capacity models, and continuously adapting based on feedback and data.

The results will be enhanced organizational dexterity. You'll be able to swiftly align your top talent and critical skills to your most important product initiatives and business outcomes. Resources can flow to the work that drives results rather than getting trapped in static allocations.