Resource Management

D. Lacking a safety net

Money, material, machine and manpower are the Four M’s, which is a common framework for defining the resources available for a project.

According to the APM (Association for Project Management) Body of Knowledge, which is the largest professional body of its kind in Europe, the resource management is ‘the acquisition and deployment of internal and external resources required to deliver the project, programme or portfolio’ (Management, 2012).

Hansen (2018) and Rius (2019) summarize the benefits of successful resource management for a company as follows:

• Avoids unexpected delays: By developing resource management plans, necessary resources can be predicted, and the unexpected delays may be avoided.
• Prevents overloads and fatigue: Effective resource management allows us to prevent overloads of resources (fatigue for humans) and bottlenecks or roadblocks by using resource allocation, aggregation and leveling techniques.
• Builds transparency: Resource management provides transparent information about the status and workloads of resources and builds transparency for all the shareholders of the project.
• Measures efficiency: It allows us to measure the efficiency of resources and enable us to work on multi-project environment. It also helps us to calculate return on investment (ROI) ratio easily.
• Provides a safety net and projection: Resource management lets us know that we did the best with the available resources in hand and it offers the future projection for the upcoming projects.

In order to get optimal performance from the resources, schedule the most valuable resources (i.e. key resources) which are the most critical and problematic resources first. This will also help you organize other resources easier.

Remember, humans are also resources, and as it is always said, human resource is the most important resource of the companies.

Steps of Resource Management

Estimating resource

Resource allocation

Resource aggregations

Resource leveling

Resource forecasting

According to Bpayne and Adrienne Watt (2014), there are five techniques and tools to estimate the resources for each activity in the project schedule.

• Expert judgment: One of the useful techniques to estimate the resources for each activity is to gather experts, who have done a similar project before and who knows which resources may be needed for this kind of a project.
• Published estimating data: Another good way of estimating resources is to look for published data of other projects such as articles, books, magazines, etc. This technique is widely used among the project managers to benchmark and compare the performance of their project and to estimate the future requirement of resources.
• Project management software: As already mentioned above, an intelligent resource management software, which lets you analyze the “what-if” scenarios, can be very useful to estimate the resources required for future projects. Details about resource management software are provided in the following subsections.
• Bottom-up estimating: In this technique, activities are broken into pieces and resource requirements are estimated for these small pieces. These estimates are summed up to find the total estimate of the project. Even though it provides very accurate estimates, it is very time consuming since each activity in the project schedule must be assessed carefully. Therefore, if the project manager divides project into smaller pieces, it brings more accuracy, but at the same time more cost to the technique.
• Alternative analysis: There may be more than one way of accomplishing an activity in terms of the number and the kind of resources. Therefore, alternative analysis must be developed to decide which alternative is the most proper one for the project (Watt, & Watt, 2014).

Even though it has several advantages, resource allocation has several challenges that a project manager must be aware of. In their website, Paweł Hałabuda (2019) summarizes these challenges as follows:

• Client Changes: Any changes in the scope, the due date or the budget can easily affect the current resource allocations. Hence, a good project manager must always be ready to adjust the resources with respect to the possible changes.
• Availability of Resources: Having multiple projects that share the same resources, broken machines, or sick workers force a project manager to monitor the resources all the time since availability of resources can suddenly change.
• Activity Predecessors: A project manager must pay great attention to the activity predecessors while allocating the resources. In most cases, there exist some activities in the project which cannot be started before some other activities are completed. In such cases, the resources to be used in these activities do not need to be prepared in advance.
• Changes in Priorities: Changes in the priorities among the projects is a common problem for a company if multiple projects run at the same time. In this situation, the resources, which a project manager has already allocated, may be needed by the other project that has a high priority for the company (Hałabuda, 2019).

This step is very vital when the same resources are shared among different projects in a multi-project environment.

In resource leveling, the aim is to solve the resource conflicts by shifting (mostly delaying) the dates of the tasks.

Top-five tips for resource forecasting in project management are as follows:

• Skills needed for the project must be thoroughly understood.
• Strengths and weaknesses of the project team members must be clarified.
• Investigate the recent projects to determine the usage (over or underutilized) of the resources and use these data to predict the future resource requirements.
• Assign the right resources to right activity in the project plan.
• Statistics about the resources such as employee turnover rate, recruitment trends, and return on investment must be kept under control (Daugherty, 2019).

In project human resources management, the main purpose is to guarantee that there are enough human resources, with the right skills, knowledge, and experience to complete the project successfully.

There are mainly four types of organization charts: functional organization, projectized organization, matrix organization, and composite organization.

Even though there are different models to describe the responsibilities, RACI model is the most widely used model in the literature, which is derived from the key responsibilities: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

A good staffing management plan consists of introduction, staffing requirements, staff assignments, and training, rewards and reassignment parts.

Resource management software can provide a clear view of resource usage and prevent resource allocation conflicts. It also allows us to follow who is working on which project, when the activity started, and how long it will take. Furthermore, it provides some real-time data analytics and historical and forecasted resource usages that give the project managers and other stakeholders valuable insights to trace the progress of the project over time.

Resource management software is the best assistant of the project manager. In literature, it is sometimes referred as resource capacity planning software.

• determine the actual demand and capacity,
• prioritize project requests for both project manager and clients,
• obtain actual resource availability,
• assign the necessary resources on the correct work and at the right time,
• find out which skills and roles are needed and provide labor hiring plans,
• establish more effective communication between team members, project manager, and other stakeholders,
• predict possible problem areas and provide valuable information for risk management plans,
• implement different objective methods for prioritizing the activities and analyze the output of what-if scenarios,
• prepare customizable, summarized and automated reports to give each stakeholder the insight they require (Townsend, 2019).

Price-performance ratio: Are there any buying options for different requirements? When compared with the similar software, how appropriate is the price? Does the price cover possible system upgrades? Is there a time-based usage fee, such as an annual usage fee or annual licensing fee?