This article appeared last year in the PM World Journal and was based on a presentation I got to give at the University of Texas at Dallas PM Symposium. For some reason, I never posted the article directly so here is “Resource Risk in an Uncertain World”. Life is risky. Thank goodness. If not for the presence of risk, what would we need project managers for? We’d just make an estimate and return on the…
“We need to improve our resource management,” is a phrase I’ve often heard yet answer it requires finding out exactly what the person meant when they said it. When we look at the resource aspect of project management, there are multiple perspectives. I would put resource management loosely into three main categories: Can we do it? How do we do it? Who will do it? Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.…
I was asked a few weeks ago to write a short article for CEO Today Magazine. It was published this past week in their Online edition. The article is about a topic I speak on often: How to do more with the same resources you have and focuses on identifying and quantifying the time resources spend that are not productive for the company nor favored by the employee. An example might be how often people…
Resource management is a subject that I lecture on often and, perhaps more interestingly, is a popular topic. You might think that after all these years of the promotion of project management practices and tools that resource management would be an old and tired subject but apparently not so much. What is it that has solving resource management challenges be so difficult? The first and most obvious answer is that we don’t all mean the…
I admit it. I’m a black-hat thinker. I think I always have been but many years ago, my first partner gave me a copy of Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats”. The book is tiny but the impact was profound. De Bono was interested in how people think and in how people could train themselves to think more creatively; more laterally. There’s no one hat that’s perfect of the six, each has its own attraction…
Over the years I’ve had many questions about how to effectively implement resource capacity planning. I’ve written about this often in these pages and in other articles elsewhere. Resource Capacity planning is theoretically very simple. All I need is the resource availability and the resource requirement expectations and a-b=c! Not so fast. The challenge has many facets. Who do we have? First of all, not all resources are made equal. The first challenge we’d…
Resource management is the most popular reason organizations will switch from individual project management to enterprise project management so you’d think that would mean we’d have an extensive playbook on how to get the very best resource management out of such systems.
If only.
Dealing with Resource overload is one of the most common challenges in project management. How do you deal with the project workload when the resources just aren’t there?
