Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Management, Economics and Finance
Year: 2021
DOI:
Concept for competency-based resource allocation in multi-project environments
Michael Riesener, Maximilian Kuhn, Alexander Keuper, and Guenther Schuh
ABSTRACT:
In recent years, companies have carried out an increasing proportion of their development activities in the form of projects, resulting in more projects being processed simultaneously. However, many projects are failing to meet their time and cost goals. The increasing number of projects, as well as the VUCA-environment, made multi-project management more complex and challenging than before. Many projects have to be scheduled and human resources have to be allocated according to their competencies and availability while avoiding resource conflicts. Therefore, a core discipline in multi-project management is resource allocation and project scheduling. Poor resource management leads to delays and missed project goals, especially in complex multi-project environments. Existing project management approaches recognize these challenges but either propose methods, which are not applicable in practice or are not able to ensure best possible project goal achievement whilst being able to react flexibly to changes and uncertainties. This paper outlines a concept for an approach that combines the flexibility of lean development with the planning quality of optimization models. The aim is to develop a practice-oriented methodology that enables resource allocation in multi-project management with a high degree of flexibility and, at the same time, the best possible achievement of goals for all projects. To further improve the resource management, resource allocation is competency-oriented in order to identify suitable resources for the project activities, to reduce bottlenecks and to adjust processing time according to available competencies.
keywords: Multi-project management, resource management, development projects.