Manage Bottlenecks

Prevention of overutilization and proactive management of bottlenecks amid increasing skill complexity

The pipeline is full

Does your company have more initiatives and projects in the pipeline than it has the capacities available to deal with? For many companies, this pressure forms a part of their day-to-day business and is caused by increasing customer-centricity and digitalization and fueled by constant change. The result are conflicts in capacity and a continuing growth of bottleneck resources. At its worst, a downward spiral in an overloaded system will create new bottlenecks in otherwise healthy projects, resulting in a chain of unplanned shifts and delays for the entire project portfolio.

“Most of the companies we accompany start with real resource management because they need transparency and control over their bottlenecks. This area of our services leads to the biggest efficiency gain for our clients.“

(Marc Neckermann, CEO, Valkeen)

Resource Planning - The New Critical Path

Today, capacities and skills determine the success of entire project portfolios (...)

Bottleneck resources = Key resources

Bottlenecks in resources are solvable and avoidable. Maybe they can’t be avoided 100% of the time, but with the right concept and tools, our clients can address them proactively. We recommend three steps:

  • 1. Identification: Locate the bottlenecks and corresponding interdependencies in the portfolio (resources and skill profiles)
  • 2. Solution: Employ ad hoc solutions to bottlenecks when they arise via simulation and derivation impact analysis for portfolio, prioritization, shifts and replacement
  • 3. Prevention: Prevent bottlenecks by improving planning accuracy and the quality of data used in forecasting, provide training and further education schemes, engage in targeted recruiting)

For all three of these steps, our clients use Valkeen’s best practices for capacity management, roles & skills management and portfolio simulations. All these factors will significantly increase the data quality associated with planning and forecasting and will help to integrate rolling feasibility assessments at the portfolio level.

6 main reasons for project delays

According to a recent study, inefficiencies in resource management made up five of the six main causes of project postponement. At the same time, it was found that a centralized Resource Management unit (RMO) correlates significantly with greatly reduced project delays.

The 6 main causes of project delays | 2022 The State of Resource Management, The Analyst Syndicate | Valkeen Consulting Infographs

Valkeen Expertise | Manage resource scarcity

The first step in proactively managing bottlenecks is identifying them. We provide a simple tool box for setting up a central database. This provides information about the supply and demand side of your bottleneck resources. With the help of simple attribution, we create clarity about the cause and effect relation of a resource conflict and can directly derive queries in the shared resource pool to solve the bottleneck.