How to Successfully Share Resources (Part 2)

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.

  New Practitioners   Resource Management  

In Part 1 this article, we looked at the situation new project managers often find themselves in with shared resources—a member of the team who is allocated to the project for only a percentage of their time and spends the rest of the time allocated to operational work, support activities or another project.

Often, new PMs find themselves shortchanged, not actually getting the number of hours that they are supposed to have—and that are needed for the success of the project. Minimizing the number of times that a resource has to switch between activities can help mitigate the impact, but it’s only a short-term solution. There also has to be a permanent solution.

I don’t care how relatively insignificant to the success of the organization the new PM’s project is, it is consuming resources—people and financial—and it needs to have the best possible chance to succeed. In addition, the project manager—and quite possibly other members of the team—is early in their career and needs to feel supported and encouraged, or they will lose engagement and motivation. If the project is being used by some stakeholders as nothing more than a supply of additional resources for other areas, then something has to be done.

The first step is for the project manager to work with the resource owner and any other stakeholders (PMO, other …

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