Rightsizing Resource Management for Complex Times

Kevin P Korterud is an Associate Director in Accenture’s Delivery Excelleence practice and currently serves as a as a subject matter expert in the areas of high performance Project, Program and Agile Product Delivery. In addition, he serves as a thought leader in harmonizing Waterfall/Agile delivery as well as in the design, build and implementation of Enterprise, Transformation and Program PMOs.

  Resource Management   Risk Management   Talent Management  

Of all the dimensions of delivery management, the ability to balance demand versus supply of people is a never-ending battle these days. The constant interplay between delivery resource needs—as well as the everchanging dynamic of day-to-day duties—introduces additional challenges when it comes to avoiding resource overload.

Resource management becomes critical when it comes to high-speed agile delivery, which has magnified these challenges as full-time resource commitments are essential in order to keep pace.

Back when I started as a project manager, resource management was a straightforward process. The number of projects was much less than today, as delivery was bound by the limited capacity of legacy technologies; an organization could only take on so many projects based on its computing power.

In addition, with all project resources typically located in a single area (or across a few floors), it was straightforward to determine day-to-day resource availability and secure resource commitments that were durable for the life of a project.

Not so today, where the need for project and product completion in a timely manner to ensure a competitive edge has never been greater—and the ability to garner resource commitments has never been more difficult given the emergence of matrixed global organizations.

Given these challenges, how does one …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.