The MOBA Project Management

The MOBA Project Management - Part 11

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The MOBA Project Management - Part 11

Resource management

Probably the MOBA project managers have the same situation as many others in industrial companies all over the world: They plan countless tasks in dozens of simultaneously running projects and then have to coordinate the availability of the required resources with the line managers.

It doesn't matter whether these are employees of the sales, development, production, purchasing, prototype construction, test, quality assurance or documentation department. None of these colleagues is fully available for project work and each of them also has to do his or her day-to-day work.

MOBA solves this problem as follows:

In the early planning phase the template of the project structure plan (Gantt diagram) for the product type to be developed is first featured with a “generic resource”.
In explicitly scheduled meetings before the kick-off meeting, those responsible for resources verbally allocate the actual resources and the project manager then integrates them into the project structure plan.

Depending on the respective department’s structure, the resources are allocated to the individual work packages by the department managers or team leaders (e.g. of the development department).

The person in charge of the resources has to make sure that the planned staff member is exempted from other tasks as far as possible at the scheduled time.

To prevent competency overlaps as well as any conflict of interests, also the resource’s absence management (vacation, trainings, etc.) lies in the responsibility of the person in charge of resources.

Note: When planning, the resource manager will always also sufficiently consider the unpredictable line business of the resource.

This means that the planned workload in projects should never be 100%. We know from experience that the time available for project work will always be 100% - X%. The technical literature speaks of about 20% of the time spent on unforeseen and/or organizational tasks.

In this way, MOBA tries to ensure that the deadlines promised in customer projects are actually met.

Don’t miss the previous 10 parts from this series: