The technology application support group of a major pharmaceutical’s R&D division is responsible for the solution de-velopment, release and support activities required to maintain existing applications and platforms. The work is per-formed by both employees and outsourced contractors located at four different sites and regions. The 150 IT staff works both on new development and support activities at any given time.

1. Context
The technology application support group of a major pharmaceutical industry company’s R&D division is responsible
for the solution development, release and support activities required to maintain existing applications and platforms.
The work is performed by both employees and outsourced contractors located at four different sites and regions. The
150 IT staff works both on new development and support activities at any given time.
Challenges
Managers and service leads juggle the assignments at the last minute with little to no information on planned activities,
their progress and staff’s availability. This resulted in fire-drill ‘emergency’ decisions when it came to assigning re-
sources to either new development or maintenance projects. In turn, these ever-changing assignments translated into
inefficient knowledge transfer from the development team to the maintenance team, and also in higher costs for out-
sourced/subcontracted resources.
In addition, imprecise and short term information on resource demand resulted in spikes of extra demand to be staffed
with very little lead time from outsourced vendors, often resulting in delayed projects. Finally, Service Leads did not
have precise and granular information to accurately calculate the total cost required to support major applications and
provide transparent budgets to their business partners.
The main underlying cause behind these challenges was the use of informal and different methods to forecast, track
and roll-up information from internal employees and vendors, and also different approaches to combine the two. Accu-
rate past and future resource demand was needed to make the best decisions when it comes to re-allocating people
from support to new development and vice versa, and committing on service levels and release dates.
Solution
The solution designed for this group and their particular set of challenges builds upon the existing project and portfolio
management capability that this group and the entire research IT division uses for their new development projects.
The UMT Consulting team worked with a core team that represented all the roles involved in the support activities. The
first task was to revisit and refine the structure utilized to organize the support projects, how information rolled up and
the level of detail that was required to produce accurate budget reports and minimize variances. This was supported
with Microsoft Project Server. After this revision, UMT consultants considered a resource management process using
Project Server and Project Professional that was aligned to this structure. Through facilitated working sessions, UMT
Pharma Research Labs IT: Taking Hold of
Resource Capacity and Demand Across Projects
A UMT Case Study

2. designed and gained consensus on the process and tool requirements to create a solid, yet flexible solution that al-
lows adjusting the level of planning and tracking detail as per management information needs across service groups.
The challenges were specifically addressed by the following key components:
 Comprehensive work management process to support projects:
 Increased planning agility through standard templates, one for each of the two levels of detail identified
(Major Application and Application Family).
 Greater predictability in resource demand, tying new development and support project capacity and de-
mand to get a real-time picture not only of current assignments, but also short term and long term de-
mand.
 Consistent information from individual projects rolling up to the portfolio data, which is defined at the functional
area level.
 Resource allocation and re-allocation transparency:
 Weekly submission of task updates to capture actual work and calculate work variances for support ac-
tivities.
 Monthly review of resource utilization and demand from both new development and support projects
through customized views to facilitate re-assignment of resources on factual past and future infor-
mation.
Results
The partnership among UMT, the Executive Sponsors and the Core Team translated into a common process to fore-
cast and track support projects across the functional areas that the support team works with. Most importantly, the
new capability also provides the much needed longer-term visibility into resource demand, which in turn allows the
group to have more effective negotiations with their outsourcing vendors: lead time to staff translates into better
rates and more precise resource skill sets.
In addition, support managers have gained a better understanding of staffing needs and are now able to plan for re-
source re-allocation across projects and proactively enable knowledge transfer from the development to the support
teams. As an organization, they are now able to:
 Consistently forecast and track how much it costs to support major applications and application families, with the
ability to break down the cost by work category or activity
 Generate information to identify and track trends resource utilization to be incorporated in future estimates and
progressively increase forecast accuracy
 Proactively determine capacity needs by role and team to re-balance assignments and anticipate outsourced ca-
pacity needs for cheaper rates
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