Taking Resource Planning beyond the "Task" - Managing Feast and Famine Cycles with Project Modeling

Chris Amato

Most would agree that "tasks" are the primary unit of currency in managing projects. But when it comes to medium or long term planning, relying only on task-level data can become a daunting (ahem) task!. It's easy to get lost in the weeds, parsing hours reports, crafting spreadsheets, counting points, etc.

On the flip side, most firms generally consider "prospective sales" or deal-flow information from the CRM, to be all but useless in resource planning. The operational mind generally avoids the uncertainties of "win probabilities" and the vicissitudes of sales forecasting altogether. But the reality is, some of those prospects will become real, so to ignore the precious meta-data that we can extract from the deal-flow is perilous.

In this session we'll look at ways of going beyond the task, and digger deeper into the CRM deal-flow to synthesize the broader patterns in workflows. Armed with such insight, we'll learn to bring both stronger operational decisions and smarter sales strategies to the team.

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