Workload Balancing

When managing a project, you look like a captain of a boat. So your team and you need to sail in the same boat for the same mission – we get goals. And if you race your team along for a long time, your team will be tired and not be able to run any more in next stage. Of course we cannot go slowly due to project deadline. So how come?

1. Introduction

You are a project leader/project manager who is responsible for running project smoothly and successfully. In this article I just express my experience sharing – one of the lessons I have learned during managing several projects in the past.

My story is workload balancing. I think that workload balancing is one of the most important points contributing to a successful project as well as keeping your team working efficiently and comfortably for a long time.

Let’s image you are an athlete on a long marathon race. Surely you cannot always keep racing along very fast and this is not obviously a good way to be a winner. The winner is the person who needs to know how to balance his/her effort efficiently.

In most of outsourcing projects, workload of team members isn’t often balanced because of

· Optimizing incorrectly resource allocation

· Doing unnecessary things

· Unbalanced Endeavour

2. Problems

I think they are 3 major causes of the issues making the workload unbalanced.

Below is the image expressing the workload of project team members (PM: Project Manager, QC: Quality Control, Dev: developer).

Figure 1: Workload balancing issue.

2.1. Optimizing incorrectly resource allocation

To optimize resource when starting a project from requirement analysis and estimation, a few key members including project manager are involved in executing tasks. Of course the number of members depends on the project size.

However, the workload of team members at this time is often too high to perform a huge amount of complex project tasks, such as: analyze & propose requirement and design, estimate based on the proposed solution...

And next stage some designers and developers are allocated to design the architecture, implement the framework as well as develop the detailed design. QC members are usually involved later than others in preparing the test environment, developing test cases and executing the test. So while developers are busy doing their tasks to develop software packages, QCs just start studying requirements and preparing the test environment.

So obviously developer’s workload at that time is increased and very high while QC’s workload is low. Then when developing software package is nearly completed, QC’s workload will be increased due to preparing and executing test.

At the last stages of project, PM and QC are busy performing their tasks (PM: controlling the quality, monitoring and tracking, preparing reports; QC: executing test cases, writing bugs/test reports…), while the main tasks of developers are fixing bugs.

2.2. Do unnecessary things

Due to misunderstanding in communication, task assignment, reading project documents or unclear requirement, a member can make unnecessary output. Certainly this needs to be executed again in high pressure. If the mistake is often occurred, it will make the project go down and behind schedule as well as this team member has to work very hard to complete the assigned task on time.

2.3. Unbalanced Endeavour

And one more main reason that makes workload of team members unbalanced is not good working mindset. He or she often does his/her tasks slowly in case task duration is fairly long and when the deadline nearly comes, he/she tries to work hard under pressure. Of course the result will be badly affected in such condition.

3. Solution

It is better to make the workload of team members as the below figure in which their workloads are similar.

Figure 2: Workload balancing improvement.

Let’s apply one of the principles of Agile software development framework, that’s frequent delivery.

In order to do this, members have to be allocated properly to complete project tasks together. Doing unnecessary things can be prevented soon when milestones of project are divided into smaller items for monitoring and tracking. The project manager and stakeholders can easily and soon detect misunderstanding points basing on each release. This helps your project not go too far.

And when milestones are narrower, working spirit and mindset of team members will be kept and prevented from loosen focus because the deadline always goes after them. Please take a look at the below figure to see the differences.

Figure 3: a suggestion for workload balancing.

There should be some controversies on what I presented in this paper about workload balancing. This article is not going deep into how to apply … efficiently. Please find another article of mine focusing on workload balancing strategy to be released soon in the same publisher J

4. About the author

Hoang Phung Duc Software Engineer Specialist HP Software Vietnam