Estimate Acivity Resources

00:02 Hello. This module takes us through the estimate activity resources process and the PMBOK guide.

00:09 Pay particular attention to this module and all the other time planning modules as well.

00:16 They are very important in the exam because each one contributes to the development of our project schedule and there will be questions in the exam about all aspects of your project schedule, including its development and understanding it. And there will probably be at least three or four questions requiring you to do a network diagram.

00:37 The difficulty is rated as medium because it's probably some things in this module that you haven't used in your work before.

00:43 But memorization is low because none of the concepts are that difficult.

00:50 So the estimate activity resources process itself is one of six planning processes in the Project Time Management Knowledge area.

01:00 The Project Time Management Knowledge Area has seven processes in total, with the addition of a single monitoring and controlling process control schedule.

01:09 The planning processes start with the Plan Schedule Management process, which produces our Schedule Management Plan, which guides all of the rest of the planning activities and the monitoring controlling activity as well.

01:24 Estimate activity resources is the third of the planning activities which end up developing our project schedule, the first being defined activities where we produce our activities list.

01:38 The second being sequence of activities where we take our activities and we put them in the order in which they occur, defining the relationships and the dependencies between them. The estimate activities, resources process, which is the focus of this module, allocates an estimated resources to those activities because generally speaking, we estimate resources first so that we can then estimate durations because the amount of resources that we have will affect the duration estimate.

02:09 For example, if we have two people completing a task or four people completing a task, this will directly affect the duration of that task or activity. So once we have that information and we've defined the activities sequence, the activities estimate the activity resources estimated, the activity durations, we can put all this information together to produce a comprehensive project schedule.

02:37 The estimate activity resources process helps us understand the following domain task.

02:45 planning task for which says develop the project schedule based on the approved project, deliverables and milestones, scope and resource management plans in order to manage timely completion of the project.

02:59 In fact, this particular domain task task for covers all of the six planning processes and the Project Time Management Knowledge area. It's all about planning what you're going to do and completing the project schedule.

03:17 The key themes of the estimate activity resources process are that what we're going to do is to take a look at the activities that we've forecast we're going to do and estimate the resources required.

03:30 But then also what resources are available to complete the activities in the schedule? Now this is an important point because we may estimate the resources we want to do the work and then through a process of negotiation, find out we don't have all those resources available when we want them, particularly in a weak matrix or functional form of organization.

03:52 And as such, our first estimate of the project resources may not be our final estimate, and there may be a lot of negotiation that has to happen.

04:02 And obviously, these negotiations will have an impact on project duration.

04:07 So that's another reason why we go and estimate the activity resources first so we can verify which resources are available to us.

04:18 There are quite a few inputs that we can use to help us produce a list of our activity resources.

04:26 Starting with, of course, the schedule management plan, remember, good project management starts with a plan and in this case it's the schedule management plan, which is an output from the plan schedule management process.

04:39 It's going to guide all of our planning and monitoring control activities.

04:43 So of course, we go looking for that.

04:45 The activity list and the activity attributes both outputs from the defined activities process.

04:53 We're going to need those as well because of course, we're trying to estimate the resources for each activity and we need that information in order to estimate the resources. The resource calendars now these are an output from some of the HR processes, the human resource processes and what resource calendars are, are they are calendars which set the availability of particular resources.

05:17 Now with people, the default resource calendar would, of course, be five days a week, excluding weekends, starting at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, going through to five or six p.m.

05:28 at night with an hour for lunch.

05:29 That's a default resource calendar.

05:31 And onto that, we might add public holidays, but then we might also want to add on vacation time.

05:38 There may be individual resource calendars for particular resources, which indicate that there may be part time or only available to work on your project at certain times.

05:47 And that's why we need the resource calendars for all of our activities so we can see when the resources are actually available.

05:56 We may also want the risk register.

05:59 This is because the risk register may contain an assessment of risks around our resources, their availability, what the chances of getting them are, how negotiation with functional managers can affect the resource allocation over the life of the project.

06:15 So we need to take those considerations into account.

06:20 We may also want our activity cost estimates.

06:23 Now these are an output from one of the cost management processes. Because we need to know how much we've forecast each activity will cost, because this will tell us whether we can use senior engineers or junior engineers, whether we can use internal staff or external consultants.

06:44 The cost of resources is extremely important in estimating which resources we want and which resources we can get.

06:52 So make sure you have access to your activity cost estimates now.

06:57 The activities cost estimates is an output from the estimate, costs process and the cost management knowledge area.

07:05 So this is a great example of the interrelationship between different knowledge areas and the PMBOK guide.

07:13 Although they're presented as separate and discrete knowledge areas, they are in fact incredibly interrelated and often use outputs from one knowledge areas process into completely separate knowledge area processes. And again, we may go looking for enterprise environmental factors, things like regulations about resource availability, health and safety regulations, perhaps is some external regulations about the amount of people that must be present on a work site.

07:44 We will need to know all of these things in order to do our resource estimating better. And, of course, organizational process assets.

07:53 These are things like our project management methodology and any relevant processes that affect how we estimate our activity resources. The particular tools and techniques that we may choose to use, if appropriate, include expert judgment when, as we already know, expert judgment is the most often used tool and technique throughout the PMBOK guide.

08:18 And remember, you are an expert about estimating activity resources, your team members, the resources themselves are experts on estimating activity resources.

08:29 Your project sponsor.

08:31 The client. External consultants.

08:33 They're all possible relevant experts that you may choose to consult in order to get accurate resource estimates.

08:42 You may also choose to use alternatives analysis.

08:45 This is where you consider all the possible ways to utilize resources to deliver that activity. Should you use people? Should you use machinery? Should you use internal staff, external staff? Super experienced staff that may be more expensive as compared to junior staff who may be cheaper but less experienced.

09:06 You have to look at all the different possible alternatives.

09:10 You may also go looking for published estimating data.

09:14 Now this can be published estimating that data that your company has internally on what resources are available and how much work they can do. Or you may choose to go outside of your company or organization.

09:27 There are many professional and commercial companies which will provide you estimating data on what resource availability is like and how much work particular resources can do. A fourth potential toll and technique is bottom up, estimating now bottom up, estimating, and we're going to see this tool and technique used in other areas, particularly estimating processes means taking a work breakdown structure and breaking all of your work down to its component parts.

10:00 Here we could stop at work package level, but we could also go down further to activity level.

10:05 And then for each of those activities, we can estimate the resources required.

10:11 Now it's called bottom up estimating because they're at the bottom level of our work breakdown structure.

10:17 And what we can do is aggregate or add up all of those resource estimates upwards to get an aggregated or total estimate of resources for a particular deliverable or sub deliverable.

10:30 Bottom up estimating is usually considered to be a very accurate form of estimating. But as I've described, it takes a lot more time than, say, top down estimating, which simply allocates resources from the top down. A final tool and technique we may find useful is project management software.

10:52 Obviously, we're probably not going to sit down with some lined paper and try and map out all of the resources that we want.

11:00 Reconcile those with the resources that are actually available and put those resource estimates back into a network diagram.

11:07 So having access to project management software and there are many, many examples globally of great project management software that does do resource estimation and feeds that information back into the development of our project schedule.

11:20 You may even have your own.

11:25 If we do all of these things, we will produce the following outputs.

11:29 The first is a list of all of our activity resource requirements.

11:33 So now our activities list has grown with more information.

11:38 We now have on it a description of the resources that are available to complete their activity.

11:45 And remember, we need this information to go to the next step, which is estimate activity durations.

11:53 So get those resource requirements all sorted out.

11:56 Do your negotiation, put your risks around it and get your list of activity resource requirements.

12:03 We may also choose to produce a resource breakdown structure.

12:08 Now, the resource breakdown structure is one of four breakdown structures mentioned in the PMBOK guide.

12:14 The other three are the work breakdown structure, the risk breakdown structure and the organizational breakdown structure.

12:22 The thing that they all have in common is they're all graphical de compositions of a higher level concept.

12:29 And I'll show you an example of a resource breakdown structure in a moment.

12:33 The final output that we may choose to put together is updating our project documents. We may choose to update our schedule management plan or any other organizational process assets that we have that help us to estimate activity resources.

12:55 So here's an example of a resource breakdown structure.

12:59 The resource breakdown structure is I've already mentioned as a graphical decomposition of the resources we need.

13:06 So this example shows Project Alpha.

13:09 I'm not sure what that's for.

13:10 It could be a software project or a construction project, but we've broken it down into the higher level categories of resources that we need.

13:18 We need some designers, we need some engineers, and we need some testers.

13:23 But then with the designers, we've broken that down even further and to senior designers and junior designers and under junior designers, we've broken that down even further to say that we need some administrative staff as well.

13:36 So that's what the resource breakdown structure can do for you is break down all of your resource needs for the project into their component parts so you can double check you've captured all of the resource needs.

13:49 So in summary, the estimate activity resources process and the PMBOK guide uses a variety of tools and techniques to estimate the resources that we need to complete the activities we're going to have to do on the project.

14:07 But remember, we have to compare what we need to the resources that are actually available, and we may have to do something about that if what we need and what's available don't match.

14:21 And if we come across that, we will feed any resource constraint information back into the schedule development, particularly the next step, which is the estimating activity durations process.

14:34 So thank you very much.

14:35 This has been an overview and an introduction to the estimate activity resources process in the PMBOK guide.