In any organization that juggles multiple internal projects, having clear coordination and allocation of resources is essential. The role of a "Bench Master" helps to achieve this by acting as the broker between the developers and the business. When a developer doesn't know where to go, they can come to the Bench Master for help!
Transparency - Business owners and employees work best when they know what's going on. Surprises are rarely a good thing.
Negotiation - Business owners and employees should feel that their needs are being catered to.
Prioritisation - Business owners and employees mutually benefit from high-value projects being worked on.
Availability- To provide support, you have to be available.
A Bench Master's primary goal is to act as the bridge between the business and the internal team members. To do this, it's the Bench Master's goal to best negotiate and consolidate these key points on the side of the Employee and the Business.
Priorities - Teams resourcing should be aligned with the business owner's priorities. Highest priority projects should get the most resourcing.
Skills - Employees' learning and professional development should align well with the company's business goals.
Professional Development - Team members should be working on projects that are in their field of interest and align well with their professional goals.
Location - Team members should work with the people in their office where possible to form strong social connections and cultivate a strong sense of camaraderie.
Movement: Team members should always feel comfortable asking to move off a project and move to another for whatever reason.
Movement is costly. So, try to have people commit to 2 months of work before moving.
Project Selection - Setup a simple process for developers to follow to get them onto a project. This is typically a company-wide process. But, as your role is to facilitate this, you should take ownership over that process.
Weekly Bench Meeting - Hold a weekly Bench Master meeting with the Business Owner to keep them up to date. Sending a summary email to the business owner and any other stakeholders after the meeting is a great addition to this for later inspection on how things are tracking.
Reports - Set up a dashboard for the Bench Master to be able to see which projects people are on, and for how long they've been on it. (These dashboards can be really useful in the Bench meetings.)
Below is a simple email template that you could add to you company's process to kick-start your Bench Mastering journey.
Subject:
{{ THE EMPLOYEE }} - Joining a Team
Hi Bench Master(s),
I'm proposing to join {{ TEAM NAME }}. I want to join this team because:
Please help me to see if this fits in with the business's goals.
Approve my request to join {{ TEAM NAME }}.
✅ Figure: Good example - Simple email template you can get your employees to use when joining/moving to a team
When you are making a decision on whether to approve an employees suggested team, or to move them to something else. Here are the key questions to answer before making a decision.
Availability
Will the employee be available for a while?
Or, are they just stopping off to the bench for a few days before going back onto another piece of work?
This is important to understand as some project might have a long onboarding time and so achieving anything meaningful is not possible, given the time-frame.
Prioritization - Is the team they're asking to work on high priority?
Resourcing - Are there other teams that have asked for more resourcing?
Skills - Are they under-equiped for that project?
Personal Development - Are they interested in learning some of the skills that would be required to work on the project? If you know what they wouldn't like to learn or work on, it's also a good time to check that too.
Achieving Goals - Do they have any long-term goals that they'd like to achieve during their time on the bench?
As you can imagine there is a lot of information that would be required for a Bench Master to be effective. The following would be useful information for a Bench Master to have:
Employees and their skills - Your CRM system likely has this information already.
Projects - It's important to know all the company's projects, and their priorities as well as skills needed to work on them. If it's a big project, knowing which part is being actively worked on would be helpful.
Reports - If there are reports that can help you glean information about the state of resourcing in the company, then it's a great idea to find those and understand them.
Bench Coordinator
Resource Coordinator
Operations Manager
Allocation Manager
Capacity Manager
Scheduling Manager