Task: Consolidate Supply
Perform a complete and accurate assessment of capacity availability to avoid over-booking resources.
Disciplines: Portfolio Management Tasks
Purpose
To ensure that executives have a correct representation of true capacity to execute work to avoid the risk of over-committing the resources with large workload backlogs.
Main Description

Provide a complete and accurate view of true availability of resources and facilities to the portfolio executives, including identification of critical resource bottlenecks and negative, recurring trends.

These key dimensions of resource consolidation are typically represented in various reports, analysis, and trends:

  • Capacity utilization
  • Team efficiency trends and measures
  • Estimated work backlog
  • Critical resource bottlenecks

The main focus of this consolidation exercise revolves around human resources, but this consolidation also includes financial resources and facilities.

Key Considerations
A common challenge with balancing the portfolio (in a way that it increases the probability of meeting schedule deadlines) is a recurring under-estimation of the work in progress, which in turn leads to an over-estimation of the organization’s capacity to accept new work.