You wouldn’t expect a book called the Resource Management And Capacity Planning Handbook to be high on the reading list of someone interested in customer experience improvement.

You’d be wrong though. Because if your employees are chronically overloaded, they won’t be able to deliver great customer experience.

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(He wanted to give it a livelier title, more like that of one of his other books, Napoleon on Project Management.) Fun title or no, this important book helps companies come to terms with what is a potentially profit-destroying problem in many organizations: chronic worker overload.

Overloaded employees are stressed, they make mistakes, and that doesn’t translate into good customer experience. @jerrymanas

He argues that most organizations “plan to infinite capacity”. They “take on everything and people have to suffer because of it.” Or they do the opposite and miss opportunities.

Instead they should make it a practice to review project needs in terms of human capacity before agreeing to take them on. Basically, many companies need to do a better job of setting organizational priorities. This means getting all the relevant department heads into a room and hashing out priorities. Jerry suggests evaluating projects through three “lenses”:

* Strategic alignment. How do the projects on our plate rank in terms of their ability to support the organization’s strategy?

*  Risks versus benefits. No project has a certain outcome. So evaluate each on the balance of risks to anticipated benefits.

*  Classifications. This lens is a little less clear. He suggests in the interview it could be things like wanting to spread project support among divisions, or focusing on the growth potential of projects. One that strikes me as a highly useful classification would be to evaluate each project’s potential impact on customer experience. Given the link between improving customer experience and long-term profitability, this seems like a natural.

 

Other capacity planning tips

Don’t over-complicate the process. This doesn’t have to be a full-blown, complex resource management analysis. Take a lean approach. Using the filters, or lenses, mentioned above, combined with human judgement and having the right people in the room to hash it all out, may well be enough to at least get you going in the right direction. Consider using project portfolio management (PPM) tools. While there are highly sophisticated tools for large organizations, there are simpler ones for smaller companies. But even the simple ones will likely take you beyond where you can get by just trying to use a spreadsheet. Have a “process party” to eliminate “process creep”. By getting rid of those nasty processes that, over time, creep up and start clogging the ability to get things done, you can free up internal capacity for more productive work. The notion of a “process party” sounds very similar to what Marcie Kiziak described in last week’s episode as a “Start/Stop/Continue” meeting.