Stop the Madness: Proactive Project 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   Risk Management  

I am sure many of you have been on the sidelines watching a game of soccer between 6-year-olds. It doesn’t matter where in the world the game takes place, the picture is always the same—everyone on the field, possibly including the goalkeepers, runs to where the ball is. When the ball moves to a different part of the pitch, everyone then runs after it and the cycle repeats.

Why am I writing about this? Because that’s exactly how a large number of organizations use resources to manage project schedule delays—they throw people at the problem without consideration of the implications either on the areas those resources have come from, nor of the extent to which people can actually solve the problem.

This results in problems simply being moved around the project portfolio and creates a “chase” where staff are regularly moved from one are to another to try and address the latest delay—a delay that wouldn’t have happened if not for previous movement of resources.

The approach of throwing resources at a set of tasks to try and address schedule issues isn’t new; in fact, it’s a recognized approach to schedule management—“crashing” the schedule. However, it continues to create all kinds of difficulties for many projects in many environments, and I believe it is because it is a significantly overused …

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