Life would be great for project managers everywhere if we could just grab whatever resources we need whenever we want and always get the best of the best of the skill sets we need at any given time. Yes, and in that world things like chocolate, ice cream and pizza would not make us fat…but that isn’t reality now is it?
So, I think we can all agree that it is a struggle to get the right resources at the right time for our projects. If you’re like me, you’re probably dealing with a matrix organization and you’re borrowing resources for your projects. You may or may not have them full time – if you can’t guarantee them 100% utilization on the project then they’re going to be splitting their time on other billable task work – probably on other projects for other project managers. And what does that do? Well, I can tell you that it definitely invites risk into each project. How/why? Because with each project comes some uncertainty in the project schedule – there’s no project in the history of projects that has run exactly as planned in the original project schedule. Now you have two of those schedules – or double the uncertainty – using the same resource and any task or timing change in one can affect a resource’s planned availability in the other. This is just a PM fact of life.
So, I think we can all agree that it is a struggle to get the right resources at the right time for our projects. If you’re like me, you’re probably dealing with a matrix organization and you’re borrowing resources for your projects. You may or may not have them full time – if you can’t guarantee them 100% utilization on the project then they’re going to be splitting their time on other billable task work – probably on other projects for other project managers. And what does that do? Well, I can tell you that it definitely invites risk into each project. How/why? Because with each project comes some uncertainty in the project schedule – there’s no project in the history of projects that has run exactly as planned in the original project schedule. Now you have two of those schedules – or double the uncertainty – using the same resource and any task or timing change in one can affect a resource’s planned availability in the other. This is just a PM fact of life.
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