Ultra short time-to-market and low costs of projects
require eective and ecient project oriented organis-
ations. As progress in projects is not always as what is
foreseen and because new projects need to be started
up all of a sudden during the year due to fast changing
results of, e.g. competitors an adequate human
resource allocation process is essential. Allocating
people to projects in multi-project environments is dif-
®cult and often faces lots of problems. Important in
this process is the coupling of day-to-day planning for
each individual person to the long-term business plan.
Our study on how to optimise an existing resource
allocation process in a large R&D organisation
pointed out that ®ve elements are vital in the set up of
an adequate resource allocation process. Central el-
ement is the so-called medium-term-resource-allo-
cation. Main output of the medium-term-resource-
allocation is a `rough-cut-capacity-planning' that
shows what projects will be active for the coming
months including a rough allocation of the resources