Deltek People Planner (RM)

Deltek People Planner is available for licensing and use with all three deployment methods of Maconomy solutions: On-Premises, Flex Plus, and DFME.

However, Deltek People Planner itself is not a cloud-based solution, and requires hosting. It can be integrated with Maconomy Flex Plus and/or Deltek First Maconomy Essentials.

Improving utilization may well be one of the toughest challenges in any professional services organization. Most firms have a vision for improving utilization, but at the same time they struggle with short-term fire-fighting for solving immediate problems, capacity that does not match the pipeline in the long term; people being moved around, and low utilization for some people, with others always having high utilization.

Perhaps that is the nature of a professional service organization—but you can do things to improve. As a minimum, the first step is to get the information that gives you an overview of the resource situation.

In most firms, the challenge is that they do not have this overview. At the very best, firms have local spreadsheets for small departments, but no corporate overview.

Based on Deltek’s experience from implementing resource management in professional services organizations, there are a number of recommendations that can help you to increase the chance of a successful resource management implementation.

Area	What to Do
Get management attention	Set the right foundation for resource planning—it requires discipline, so be clear on processes and goals—and get management attention on this; otherwise, firms tend to do as they used to do.
Apply simple project planning	Make planning very simplified—assign on the project level and by week. The primary goal is to achieve a corporate resource overview—do not focus on project management, but purely on project planning to achieve the corporate resource overview.
Remove Excel spreadsheets and apply a corporate overview	Department managers protect their resources by maintaining their own overviews, which they prefer not to share. Get rid of local spreadsheets, and move to one corporate solution.
First focus on short-term, then on long-term planning	Get a resource overview for the coming 3–4 months to see where there is over-utilization and under-utilization. Later on, you should focus on long-term planning and include your pipeline projects in the resource overviews.
Engage people	People are more likely to achieve higher utilization when they are engaged in the planning of the assignments that they are working on—when all of the preceding goals are achieved—engage people in the planning.