Allocating and Managing Constrained Resources

This chapter provides a variety of techniques for monitoring the resources used within your project. The emphasis is on human resources, but the principles can be applied to any project resource.

Summary

  • Resource management is about making sure you have the resources you need at the right time, but it's also about avoiding stockpiling resources unnecessarily (and therefore wasting them). The most detailed schedules and budgets in the world are useless if you don't have the people, equipment, facilities, and other resources you need, when you need them. Until you have assigned and committed resources, you don't have a project schedule and your budget has no real meaning.
  • The essence of resource allocation is resource loading, or the process of assigning resources (most often people) to each and every project activity. While having everything you want when you need it is the ideal, it's rarely the norm in the permanent whitewater of living order. In a changeable environment, resource allocation is all about adaptation and seeing the big picture.
  • Resource allocation is inextricably tied up with risk management. If you fail to secure the resources you need when you need them, you risk delays, mounting costs, and even project failure. Two of the most common ways that a needed resource can suddenly become unavailable to your project are over-commitment (which occurs when a task takes longer than expected, typing up a resource longer than expected) and over-allocation (which occurs when a resource is allocated to multiple projects with conflicting schedules).
  • For resource allocation, two important geometric-order tools are resource leveling and resource smoothing. Another helpful option is a scheduling method known as the critical chain method (CCM), which focuses on the resources required to complete a project.
  • In Agile, where time and money are typically fixed, managing resources is theoretically a simple matter. However, the self-organizing nature of Agile teams presents special resource allocation challenges which can be overcome through resource capacity management.
  • John Elkington introduced the term triple bottom line (TBL) as a way to broaden corporate thinking about the cost of doing business to include social and environmental responsibilities. Elkington argued that rather than focusing solely on profit and loss, organizations should pay attention to three separate bottom lines: profit, people, and the health of the planet.
  • Whereas individual project managers naturally focus on short-term resource availability for their projects, an executive's goal is ensuring that resources are available for many projects over the long term. When looking at resources from the portfolio level, try to make sure no project exceeds one-third to one-fourth of the organization's total capacity. Also keep in mind that some projects require a healthy contingent of highly creative people, but too many creative people on a project can hamper execution. A good rule of thumb is to have about 30% of staff be highly creative.
  • You need to be prepared to adapt your budget, scope, and schedule to the externalities that evolve during project execution. And keep in mind that a constraint on the availability of resources is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to an organization or to an individual project. You can forestall crises related to resources by practicing proactive resilience – that is, by taking timely action to prevent a crisis, often by introducing a change that upends the usual way of doing things. In living order, where resource availability is never a given, proactive resilience is an essential component of good resource management.