How to embrace uncertainty with adaptive project management
How to embrace uncertainty with adaptive project management
Whether it’s the financial climate or internal disruptions, one of the key challenges that businesses face is preparing for uncertainty. Complete certainty is rarely achievable in business. Finding ways to quickly adapt when facing the unexpected is paramount for a business to thrive and build resilience.
In this guide, we’re looking at how adaptive management solutions such as Planview AdaptiveWork can provide the insights required to help your business operations become more proactive and flexible.
We’ll also pinpoint the specific features that can help you plan for future obstacles and changes.
Prepare for operational uncertainty with these adaptive solutions
While a completely risk-free business is hard to come by, there are ways to mitigate common risks.
Risks might include not having the resources to keep up with demand. Or, you might have a lack of visibility into the progress of your projects. Silos in project operations can be a common issue, so having visibility into operational uncertainty is crucial for making more informed decisions.
Project management solutions can help you facilitate tracking and monitoring. These solutions can help you stay on top of project progress, identify deviations, and make data-driven decisions.
Without real-time insights on projects or portfolios that are falling behind on target, it will be difficult to adapt. The below solutions will help your business proactively manage undesired situations.
Resource and capacity planning
One of the most popular features of adaptive project management solutions is resource and capacity planning. This gives your resource managers all the insights they need from a single dashboard. Timeframes can be customised and include insights months in advance.
This feature lets you build a comprehensive database of all available resources, including skills, availability, roles and experience. Efficient allocation can be achieved through the categorisation of resources based on skill sets, teams or departments. Allocate specific resources to individual projects or tasks based on their availability and skill match.
Crucially, you can compare the demand for resources across all projects with the available resource capacity to identify any resource shortages or overallocations.
You can also ensure that resources are not overworked or underused. Identify opportunities to optimise resource allocation for maximum efficiency.
This links nicely with scenario planning. By using “what-if” scenarios to assess the impact of adding or removing projects and resources on your overall capacity.
Use historical data and predictive analytics to forecast future resource needs and make informed decisions about hiring or training requirements.
Scenario planning
With Planview AdaptiveWork, you’ll have a built-in scenario planning feature. This enables you to develop multiple resourcing scenarios to meet demand based on different levels of uncertainty. This allows you to be prepared for various outcomes and reduces the impact of unexpected events.
Based on the scenario analysis, you can develop the best scenario to provide the highest outcome with the given resources. For each scenario, you can outline specific actions to take if that scenario unfolds.
In addition, the scenario planning feature lets you create and define different scenarios based on various factors, such as market conditions, project risks or external influences. These scenarios should encompass a range of possible futures. From there, you can assess the impact of any one of these scenarios on each of your projects. From there, you can allocate the best scenario.
Choosing the best scenario possible will reduce stress and minimise financial loss for your business. It will also help you comply with service-level agreements and contracts while boosting client satisfaction.
Adaptive and agile methodologies
Adopting an agile or adaptive project management approach enables you to keep teams aligned, even when the focus or goals change. This allows for flexibility in responding to changes and uncertainties as they arise. Agile methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban, can be particularly useful in dynamic environments. The Planview AdaptiveWork dashboard and views are perfectly set up to facilitate these management styles.
Interested in learning more?
Helping businesses become adaptive to change is what Planview AdaptiveWork project management was designed for. Let our team of specialists show you through the platform with a demo. We’ll answer all your questions and show you how the features work. We’ve been supporting businesses with their digital transformations for 10+ years.
