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Resource Management


Notes:

As in most organisation our drive is for profit and hence you would expect resources to be managed with a commercial view.

A key problem we faced in the new structure, with its flexible pool of resource, was planning the resources allocated to a project.There were two significant factors:

Insufficient account was taken of the knowledge individuals had in relation to a particular project. People were moved between projects like pawns on a chess set, with one person being considered indistinguishable and interchangeable for the next.

Overly optimistic project planning, and a failure to replan (we'll come back to the reasons for this) meant that projects approaching completion date would generate an unplanned demand for resources that would continue well past the planned project completion.

Resource planning degenerated into “fire fighting mode”: the efforts to put out a fire on a project that is having difficulty meeting its objectives were, at the same time, striking the match under the next project (which was starved of resources).

Brook's law “adding resources to a late project makes it later” was repeatedly demonstrated. (Brooks: “The Mythical Man Month”)

This scenario is repeated in organisation after organisation and appears to be an area in which we, as an industry, have a major learning dilemma: despite manifest evidence and repeated documentation in the literature, no link between cause and effect is being recognised.