Staffing is one common feature of organisations the world over, regardless of the type of services rendered or products produced. And all managers, business leaders or project managers, etc., totally understand the need for adequate staffing for fulfilling the needs and mandate of their organisations.
However, having adequate staffing does not guarantee business or project success. It is in this regard that business leaders must ensure that their staff possess all the requisite skill set to successfully execute project responsibilities. This is where the idea of staffing management plan comes in.
In this article, we will discuss what a staffing management plan is, its uses, how it can profit your organisation as well as tips and ideas on how you can create your own project staffing plans or project documentation templates and project design and more. Furthermore, we will introduce you to complete, simple and easy-to-use collaboration tool: Sinnaps online project management software that will enable you all these and lots more.
Staffing Management Plan
A staffing management plan in PMP is a plan which defines an overall staffing approach for staffing a project, i.e., it takes care of staffing requirement for various project teams. Among other things, this plan is meant to accommodate such issues such as acquisition timelines for employee contractors and outsourcing firms, and defines the period through which services of staff would be required for that particular project, as well as their release.
This plan also takes care of such things as training requirements of staff, location, team building strategies, and all such things which will lead to the achievement of the goals and aspirations of the project.
Staffing management plan is however, not to be confused with human resource management plan. The confusion arises much due to the similarities between the two. If you define staffing management plan as an approach to acquiring and managing human resources for a project, one who is not so grounded in the tenets of project management could easily confuse this definition as pertaining to human resource management – and this shouldn’t be.
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Staffing Management Plan Example
Before we go on and create our staffing management plan, there are a few tips that will keep on the right track:
- Understand the idea behind your project – Let’s say we’re creating a staffing management plan example template for a marketing project, then we must as a matter of necessity first strive to understand the goals for our marketing project as well as other related objectives. Thereafter, we can go further to put together a list of the required skills and manpower that will help with successful execution.
- Cut to the chase – As a matter of fact, your staffing plan should go straight to the point. It is important that you skip all frivolities and instead, properly emphasise the roles and responsibilities, and how they are inline with your organisations policies. Your plan is not meant to please people.
- Use a suitable template – As you get ready to put your project management staffing plan together, there is the need to make use of a good template. If you work for an organisation which have handled projects before, then there’s a good chance you might find this in your organisation’s knowledge management system. If there’s none, then you may search on line to find one that will be suitable for your goals.
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Staffing Management Plan Template
Now we know what consider as we articulate our plans, now let’s look at what to include in our staffing management plan template:
- Overall staffing approach – Your plan should include details on how you intend to acquire employees for your project. Would it be much costlier to use employees in your organisation, would it be better if you made use of outsourcing firms and contractors? All these should be talked about.
- Location – This section provides details on the locations of members of the team. For example, some projects make use of teams working from home, others may be collocated, while other organisations even make use of virtual teams.
- Training – We said earlier, that having an adequate number of staff for your project doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. Thus, you also need to make proper arrangements for training. This will give them the required skills to perform their obligations.
- Reassignment – Since a project is a temporary endeavour, there ought to be a plan for reassigning members of the project team at the close of the project
- Discuss rewards and consequences – your staffing resource management plan should contain information about staffing rewards for exceptional performances as well as consequences. It is always a good idea to go into details about the rewards, including conditions for eligibility.
- Other considerations – This is where you discuss other matters that are related to staffing and human resources for your project.
Staffing management plan (PMBOK) plays a great role in project management. And seeing how critical human resource is in the success of any project management endeavour. Thus, you must ensure clarity in your staffing management plans.
