Balancing the Project Checkbook

  Estimating   Manufacturing   ProjectsAtWork  

Approving a project is like writing a check: you’re committing your organization’s resources to completing activities. But often the process fails to recognize that the most critical resource — people — is overdrawn. Here is a simple first step to better estimate the human cost component of your project.

Project managers all recognize the triple constraint of time, cost and performance. However, they often fail to recognize that cost includes a human component. Multiply this oversight across all of the people in your organization who are approving projects and it begs the question, “Who is checking the bank balance to ensure we do not overdraw our people?”

The effects of overdrawn human resources are everywhere. In one division of a large manufacturing company, a scheduled, high-priority project was never actually completed. A project manager at a mid-size service organization confesses he rarely meets a deadline on large projects because time-consuming, low-priority activities keep getting dumped in his lap. A pharmaceutical company lags behind the industry because there are not enough of the “right people” to complete its most critical work.

Formal project approval processes tend to focus on financial capital and not human capital. All projects require human resources, which, like financial resources, become unavailable for other work when …

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