Dramatically Reduce Resource Management Conflicts with a Few Simple Steps
You want the rock-star contractor, but by the time you call him he’s already booked.
You hire full-time staff for your new project, but you soon realize you won’t need half of them for another three months.
You’re ready to launch a new phase in your implementation, but the budget hasn’t been dispersed yet, leaving your team sitting on their hands.
What quality do these three resource management problems share?
They all stem from a failure to plan ahead.
This failure is very common within IT:
- A study by project management consulting company PM Solutions identified poor resource planning as one of the top five reasons IT projects fail. Companies in the study faced an average of $74mm worth of “at risk” projects a year because of these problems.
- Ronald Biasaccia, managing partner at Alvarez & Marsal, found the average multinational experiences $230mm a year from extra costs due to timeline and budgeting conflicts. He blames more of these failures on evaluation problems than execution problems.
- Author and business strategist Bernard Marr agrees; “Lack of resources is usually due to one thing: lack of planning.”
Keeping this point in mind, re-read our opening examples. You will see that each of these problems could have been prevent with more effective resource planning.
Why is your rock-star contractor already booked by the time you tried to sign him?
Because you likely tried to sign him at the last minute, without taking into account the fact he requires a minimum of 8 weeks lead time prior to signing onto an assignment.
Why did you hire full-time staff three months before they are needed
Because you never created a clear picture of when, why and where they were needed in the broader project timeline. You just knew you needed them, at some point, for the project.
Why isn’t the budget in the bank when you need it?
Because you didn’t note when the relevant funds were going to be dispersed, and you scheduled a certain phase of your project to launch before the cash the phase needed was actually available.
In each example—and most other examples of resource management conflicts—applying greater discipline to planning out resource needs and allocation timelines could have prevented these problems.
The solution isn’t sexy, but it works. Plan better.
Your Keys to Conflict-Free Resource Management
- Print up a list of your projects
- Sit down with your project managers and list out resource dependencies, including, but not limited to purchases, personnel and contractors.
- Map these needs against the project’s timeline, keeping a close eye on when you need resources and when they are available. (When budget is dispersed, when internal staff aren’t working on other projects, when you actually need new staff or contractors during the project’s timeline, etc.)
- Shift your project timeline around available resources, as possible.
- Book all of your required resources now. (It’s good to know when you need resources; it’s better to already have them reserved.)
- For those resources you cannot book now, create dependencies within the project plan so you are not on the hook if necessary resources aren’t available when you need them.
