SAP project management is ideally planned out strategically in advance. However, with the number of resources involved in each project, disruptions can and do occur. When left with a project resource shortfall, standard practices often lead to snowballing delays. The “Premium of Panic” is the cost of delayed projects and the increased costs of rushed resourcing.
In a typical scenario, an end user (the company planning an SAP project over the coming year) will engage a consultancy to work on their SAP project. The end user will have a project lead who liaises with the consultancy’s SAP Project Manager, and together they plan out the project. Resources will be allocated by a Project Management Office (PMO) or Resource Manager, often an HR professional. Typically, this is left to late in the planning, in order to avoid a high rate of drop-outs and to ensure that the correct resources are allocated to the correct projects.
As existing recruitment job boards don’t cater this far into the future, there are no applicants and the role is left to re-try closer to requirement. As the start-date get closer, the role is sent to market hoping someone happens to be available. Job boards ads are paid for, but market resources are on other projects. The role goes to a recruitment agency in case they have someone “on the books.” The time this takes means the role start date is delayed by a fortnight, which pushes out other project dependencies and the eventual agency placement is charged fees and a percentage of day rates, reducing project budget efficiency.
In the case of a consultancy, this often means team building for an SAP practice – that is, hiring enough permanent SAP professionals to fill all upcoming project requirements, with contractors to fill in the gaps.
Strategic Practice & Team Building in SAP Project Management
The Premium of Panic can be avoided by eliminating transactional recruiting practices that lack forward visibility into who will be available at the time of planned projects. For both internal talent teams and practice managers, this means strategically resourcing well ahead of time. In fact, this is the aim of almost every SAP project manager, PMO, recruiter and CFO. So why has it been so difficult?
Achieving a watertight strategic team or practice build requires a high level of agility in SAP project resourcing. Good management is able to switch resources internally across complex operations, but as yet there is little in the way of effectively replacing missing resources on the spot. The weak link is the inability to have external resources onboarded at the moment they are required.
To enable agile strategic recruiting, your TRP (Talent Resource Planning) system must have an on-demand talent pool. This is a two-way street; To maintain live availability at the same time as upcoming availability, consultants also need to be keeping their schedules visible to SAP Project Management.
This means your internal talent team or practice manager can view forward resource availability, months in advance, so you can plan your hiring and onboarding to match market availability well ahead of the curve, eliminating costly delays and workarounds.
AJ Moore, founder of Availery, says:
“The ‘human-Tetris’ of resource management can work well for internal teams, but there’s been no way to plan ahead or be strategically smarter about access to external talent. Good people are one of the most significant investments for both project team and practice builds. Having the foresight to proactively manage supply with demand, means avoiding the expense that comes with a resourcing crisis.”
“Projects benefit from having the ‘right’ person available, not the ‘only’ person available. Forward planning means knowing the schedules and lead times to manage to get these best results.”
Unlocking Strategic Team Building with On-Demand Talent
The “Premium of Panic” really starts to be felt at this point – a need to gain access to available SAP resources as the project nears, or even worse, as gaps need to be filled, usually means a spend on:
- Internal talent teams
- Job boards / advertising
- Recruitment agencies
- Potential cost of delayed project
- Flow on effect of resourcing delays or reallocation from other projects
The key to unlocking this dilemma is to give your internal talent team an on-demand talent pool, giving them the ability to on-board talent in advance and assign talent within hours or days should the need arise. This means they are able help your PMO or Resource Manager to acquire both internally and externally in tandem, effectively reducing delays by having the tools needed to resource in real time.
However, so far it has been an impractical proposition to access such a key resource, without going to external agencies. These agencies have spent their own time and resources on maintaining their talent pools, and they expect to be compensated for their expertise, which does not come cheap. The Premium of Panic strikes again.
Internal Access to an External Talent Pool
The way to remove the need to pay for visibility into available resources, both upcoming and on-demand, is to have internal talent teams build and maintain a talent pool owned by the end user or SAP practice. This can be prohibitively expensive to build and challenging to maintain.
We’ve come to the rescue. InsideSAP Careers is now live, with hundreds of SAP consultants available across all skill sets. Our system smart-matches your requirements with the skills and availabilities of our users, and updates availabilities as they are hired.
With a view into our market talent pool, team builders can:
- Increase visibility into forward resource availability
- Stay ahead of the curve by planning hiring in advance
- Match future market resource availability to upcoming projects well in advance
- Solve resource gaps near-instantly
- Reduce resourcing stress with empowered internal / external resourcing in tandem
InsideSAP Careers helps eliminate the Premium of Panic by giving practice managers AND consultants the ability to plan in advance, so disruptions are avoided and resource gaps minimised. Our low and transparent fee structure means you pay a single rate, rather than paying for job boards and recruitment agencies.
Even better, it’s completely free to sign up, access our available talent and post job vacancies. Our contracts and on-boarding are handled in-app, further reducing costs, and our users are insured for up to $20 million PI/PL, all on-demand.
Take a look today with a theoretical project build. Once you are ready to move ahead with a real life team or practice build, simply smart-match with your available consultants and start resourcing. We’ll offset the carbon footprint of SAP Project Management,by planting trees on your behalf, for every resource you on-board.
