Resource forecasting

To plan out portfolio for an organization portfolio managers need a way to perform high-level analysis of resource requirements, availability and assignments. Portfolio managers need ability to view high level resource estimates and then use that as a criterion for prioritizing the projects. Additionally a good way to analyze resource requirements and forecast resource allocations is to perform what-if analysis of resource estimates or requirements, staff availability and planned allocation of resources. Portfolio managers can view and analyze the resource requirements and the staff availability. They can then create several staff allocation scenarios with varying resource allocations. They can perform what-if analysis to compare different staff allocation scenarios and use the information to strategically plan the projects.

You can use the resource forecasting features in BMC IT Business Management Suite to estimate resource requirements, plan and forecast staff availability, and create staff allocation scenario for resource allocations. You can also create multiple staff allocation scenarios with varying allocations to compare and identify the best resource allocation scenario for your organization and for identifying the resource requirements for ongoing and future projects. The resource forecasting features include auto allocation that can help you quickly view the distribution of available staff for the current or projected resource requirements based on the priority of project that you have defined.

The resource forecasting features leverages the IT Job Family and IT Job category features of BMC IT Business Management Suite. In BMC IT Business Management Suite, an IT staff is always assigned a job family and job category. The job categories provide more granular level to a job family. This helps in setting the profile of an IT staff member. When you use BMC IT Business Management Suite to perform resource forecasting, you can use job family and job category to identify resources that you require and resources that are available. For example, if you require database administrators of varying skill levels, you can select job family of database administrator and job category of database administrator 1 or database administrator 2. You can then use the job family and job categories to create staff allocation scenarios for your project portfolios.

For more information on creating job families and job categories, see Characterizing-IT-staff.

At a high level, the following steps are involved in demand and resource forecasting:

1. Project managers specify the resource requirements for each project. For more information, see Estimating-Resources.
2. Resource managers create an inventory of available and planned staff. For more information, see Creating-inventory-of-available-staff-for-staff-allocation-scenarios.
3. Portfolio managers use the resource requirement data, inventory of staff and project priorities to create staff allocation scenarios. For more information, see Creating-staff-allocation-scenarios.

The following figure shows the process of creating staff allocation scenarios using resource requirements and available resources: