Planning Human Resources

00:02 Now that you've worked out who you need and how much time they need to dedicate to your magnificent project, you must work out when they can give you their time. The first thing you should do is create a schedule using a simple template.

00:17 Just detail.

00:18 Who needs to do what and when.

00:21 Of course, you need to keep your calendar at hand for this part.

00:25 It's important to keep track of employees schedules.

00:28 You also need to obtain confirmation from their department heads as there is a chance they will need them at certain times or refuse outright to let you have them, in which case you will need to work with the project sponsor to find an alternative plan.

00:42 You also mustn't forget to check their personal availability, including any planned holidays. You can't expect people to send you important emails while they're enjoying their time at the beach.

00:54 Let's go back to the showroom example.

00:57 I'll zoom in to the workstream for the development of the software for the interactive displays of your showroom.

01:03 This is how creating a schedule works.

01:07 First we add columns for the name of the task, the person responsible and the expected duration.

01:15 Then we add a calendar with the month and weekdays.

01:20 Do not forget to check for holidays and mark them, for example in the US. The 4th of July is a national holiday.

01:28 After that, we can mark the days or weeks when the person is not available to work on the project tasks.

01:37 Finally, for an extra level of detail, you can add the amount of time that the person responsible can dedicate to the project tasks in each cell.

01:46 And yes, this is quite similar to our favorite, the Gantt-Chart.

01:52 So after we filled in the details, we can see in this workstream there are two developers, Steve and Terry.

02:00 Jon, on the other hand, is responsible for the whole IT delivery and will be managing and coordinating their work.

02:07 Monica has been appointed to do software testing and every few days she will need to test the created software and provide feedback.

02:16 This shouldn't be a problem to manage with this schedule, but we'll admit that it's not the most high level way of organizing it, especially with large numbers of employees. A good idea is to clearly define everyone's roles and responsibilities, so that's what we'll do in the next lesson.