RESOURCES

I've never liked referring to people as 'resources,' as the term is a bit too impersonal and cold for my taste. However, in the PM community, the term fits rather well.

In today's drive-thru, multi-task, do-everything-now business environment, a project manager's acquisition and retention of project team members is a critical skill and is vital to project success. Why? Because a PM who doesn't pay attention to these matters is going to wind up empty at the 'resource pool' and isn't going to deliver on-time or close to it.

Within organizations, competition for available talent is fierce and if you don't play that game well, you lose. Not only is competition for talent a major issue, but retention of that talent on your projects can be problematic because there is always demand for the skills of the folks on your teams, and I've seen plenty of savvy, political PMs poach the time (directly or not) of other projects' members to advance their projects and agendas. In my PM classes, a challenge often identified by students often is the lack of available or allocated resources and/or having team members continually re-assigned to whatever crisis-of-the-moment is hitting their organization.

This issue has a whole bevy of problems and solutions, so I offer a few insights now and will return to this often.

• Make certain that you have asked for adequate staff in the project plan, schedule and budget. Your plans shouldn't be grandiose or overly padded with tons of staff, but other than the normal allowances taken for project scheduling (productivity, time off, etc.), you should have some room in the schedule and staffing for work that may come up that has nothing to do with your project, but you may need to account for later. Trying to shave a few bucks off of the budget by subtracting resources can come back to haunt you later when those resources suddenly disappear into someone else's black-hole.
• Beware of the multiple-project-allocation trap when utilizing people with project responsibilities on a number of different projects. If you need to utilize a scarce and heavily-in-demand resource, you will eventually find those resources reallocated to some other task or project - without your input and usually after-the-fact. Stay on top of what these folks are working on at all times as your project executes. If your work isn't getting the allocation that it needs, take action with that person or his/her management as soon as you can. If you cannot get a committment for that person to return to your project tasks immediately, get a committment for when that can happen, adjust your project pln accordingly, and start looking for a replacement if that can be reasonably accomplished.
  
• Watch out for "resource hoarding." To combat having resources taken away or otherwise becoming unavailable to them, some PMs utilize what I call "resource hoarding" - scheduling resources as unavailable when, in fact, the resources have little or nothing to do on that PMs project at any particular point in time. PMs do this so they can control availability of critical resources to their projects, but takes away the resource for others. This is largely a political issue, and if its played in your company, I advise that you understand how that game is played. Even if you don't plan to play, you will eventually, because its being played on you and your projects, often to your project's detriment.
• Direct management flip-flops. In situations where you don't managerially control the project team members, their direct management will often reassign their charges to other work - notify you after the fact. That's bogus, and call the line manager on it when it happens. I was co-managing a project couple of years ago and the direct manager of a key team member told us at 5:30 PM one night that yes, her direct report would be "100% dedicated" to our project for the 4 weeks we needed him. By 8:30 AM the next morning, she had reallocated her employee to another project that wouldn't deliver anything for a year, but made her look good to her management. We called her on it later that afternoon in a meeting with our project's sponsors and major stakeholders, and while we wound up not getting her employee in the end, we were able to bring in a person from the outside to assume the work even though a hiring freeze had been imposed.
  

Like I mentioned earlier, I'll update this thread continually because starving projects of resources occurs frequently and is a key contributor to project failures.