Looking for best practices for requesting resources / assembling a project team.

[KatieCI]

I manage Workfront for a marketing project management office. I am trying to improve the process that Project Managers currently use to request resources for their projects aka assemble a project team. I am going to outline our current process below, but I would like to hear from others on what your process is and what Workfront functionality you use to support it.

1. Project Manager sends an Update to functional managers asking who should attend a Planning Meeting for the project. This is before deliverables are defined, so at this point the PM is using a Program and one Project called the "Central Project" to represent the project.
2. Functional Managers reply-all (painpoint) with who from their team should attend the Planning Meeting. This may or may not be the final resource who gets assigned to the deliverables.
3. Once additional Projects have been created to represent the deliverables, functional managers are assigned tasks to use the Workload balancer to assign resources to each deliverable. This is a painpoint too, because many managers are ignoring that task and the PM ends up having to assign people anyway.

Some managers feel this is redundant process, because the person they sent to the Planning Meeting is the resource they will eventually assign to the deliverable projects. Others want to attend the Planning Meeting themselves and make an assignment decision later on. One thought for improvement I've had is to utilize the People tab instead of a reply-all update and create an automation that will notify the PM when people are added to the project. I'm just looking for a plethora of ideas on more efficient ways to handle assembling a project team.

[Richard__Carlson]

The situation you've described seems relatively up-in-the-air when I think about our process.

Projects are defined by their deliverables, deliverables are chosen in custom forms in request queues.  As much as possible we aim to have as much information as possible present in the request when it's open so that it can be converted to a project and work can start quickly.  Once a project is opened, tasks can be assigned and work can start.

We have more than 1000 active projects in our system right now, if each one needed a meeting to assemble the project I don't think it would be an effective use of our time.