In many large organizations, there is a gap between the focus of critical knowledge workers — those who work on development projects such as products and services — and the key strategic priorities of the company. Often, demands for these skilled resources exceed the available supply. It is then common for organizations to devolve into a chaotic and unproductive series of urgent firefights to get new products or systems out the door.

A response to this problem has been a process called Knowledge Resource Planning (KRP) from Business Engine Software in San Francisco. KRP is, in many ways, supply chain management for people instead of material. It is a collection of cross-functional processes that balance the supply and demand of highly skilled workers, such as engineers, programmers, systems designers, scientists and chemists, to ensure optimum utilization in resource-constrained environments.

On the demand side, KRP identifies, measures and prioritizes activities that consume resources, including projects, initiatives, maintenance and other activities. On the supply side it identifies, classifies and measures in-house staff, contractors, recruiting requirements and other sources of knowledge resources.

The output of the KRP process is both a tactical management tool and a planning-oriented decision support system that matches resource utilization to organizational goals, objectives and priorities. KRP helps organizations gain visibility, management and optimization of its development resources through the application of technology.

Business Engine's software is an enterprise client/server application with powerful resource management, decision support and modeling tools that allow organizations to optimize knowledge resources across the entire enterprise. It integrates budgeting, manpower and project planning into a single organization-wide application, reducing the time required to prepare budgets while dramatically improving the quality of the plans. But unlike other project management oriented solutions, Business Engine puts the emphasis on the supply, or resource side, as opposed to dollars or tasks.

By taking budgeting from the desktop to the enterprise level, this approach gives managers a global view of the entire portfolio of projects and resources in an organization. Almost immediately, organizations can increase effective deployment of knowledge resources. The end result is a much more optimized project portfolio with strategic projects receiving more resources and the least important projects falling away.

At a higher level, executives can select the mix of projects with the highest payoff using available or acquired resources. This top-down planning process reconciles project commitments with both resource capacity and manpower and budgeting requirements. Access to enterprise-wide resource inventory reduces conflicts and improves execution.

KRP helps organizations align their best resources with their highest priority initiatives, find resources that can be "freed up" to work on an important new project, determine the proper mix of projects to undertake, find necessary skills "hidden" in the organization, view the entire "portfolio" of projects and predict what happens to other projects if a new project is added.

Cummins Engine and Medrad, Inc., are two companies that have adopted KRP and implemented Micro-Frame's Business Engine as the solution to how they manage their knowledge resources.

Diesel engines manufacturer Cummins uses Business Engine for bottom-up planning and has benefited through reduced project costs and the avoidance of false or late project starts.

For Medrad, a developer of medical imaging systems, decision-makers now understand the overall capacity of their department and how project demands effect this capacity. Business Engine provides Medrad a view of its entire mix of projects, all in one central repository. All surplus manpower is clearly visible, which means that functional managers must provide clear accountability for the activities of all personnel.

Faced with the shortage of skilled resources for a growing list of critical development projects, Cummins and Medrad chose to optimize the resources they already have. Taking this new approach toward solving a common problem offers opportunity for a knowledge-based competitive advantage over the competition.

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