Getting Strategic with Resource Management

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Resource Management   Strategy   Talent Management  

For project managers, the greatest challenge is often the need to manage their teams effectively. You need to build a group of people who can come together cohesively and who are motivated to deliver the project in accordance with the plan.

At the same time, you need to manage each of the individual team members and help them to achieve their personal objectives from the project and solve their individual problems. That’s a huge amount of work, especially on top of all of the other project management tasks that have to get done. But unfortunately, it isn’t enough.

A project team is simply one small part of a much larger organization, and resource management needs to recognize that. There will be occasions when the best thing for an individual (or for the team) is for someone to leave the project and go work somewhere else. There will be times when the perfect person for a task isn’t currently working on the project and needs to be added. If project managers aren’t proactively managing those situations, they are doing a disservice to their employer.

It’s not just an organizational problem
Many PMs will take the view that they are assigned resources by functional areas, through a PMO, or in some similar fashion and they simply need to manage those resources within the confines of the project. The idea that they need to be concerned …

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