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“Project management is like juggling three balls: time, cost, and quality. Program management is like a troupe of circus performers standing in a circle, each juggling three balls and swapping balls from time to time.”
~ Geoff Reiss, project management pioneer and expert
Anyone who’s ever even dabbled in project management knows that it can feel a lot like juggling. But does it ever feel like you’re juggling people, not balls?
Resource allocation sits somewhere between project and program management, recognizing that many projects (and most IT projects) rely on specialists, shared resources who get juggled between projects.
If you’re struggling to keep all the people afloat or to get enough time from certain skill sets, then refining your approach to resource allocation may be the key that unlocks a more consistent and sustainable way of managing projects.
What is resource allocation?
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Resource allocation is finding and assigning people, things, and work time (resources) to specific projects or initiatives. Or to say it another way, resource allocation is the process of dividing out available limited resources in a way that best meets operational or organizational goals.
Every business and every project is limited in multiple ways. The discipline of resource management (which includes resource allocation) is a way to respond to resource constraints, getting the best possible results with the resources available.
Project managers and others who lead projects regularly do the work of resource allocation. It may be formal or informal, stated or implied, scheduled or assumed. But anytime you’re assigning people and things (hardware, budget) to projects, you’re doing a form of resource allocation.
And generally speaking the better an organization does at resource allocation, the greater the chances of project success.
What does the resource allocation process look like?
Resource allocation can include different types of resources, including human, financial, and technological resources. Most projects involve all three, though you won’t always need to allocate all three for every project.
For example, in a conventional office setting, you might be able to safely assume (for the purposes of a typical project) that assigned humans already have laptops and paychecks. Budgeting and IT provisioning are still real things, but the person allocating (human) resources doesn’t have to consider the other resource categories.
On the other hand, if you’re managing a team that’s building some complex piece of tech and needs access to shared specialized hardware, then technological resource allocation is absolutely part of the mix.
While the details will depend on the contours of the project, resource allocation usually follows a repeatable set of big-picture steps:
Outline the goals that you’re trying to support.
Identify resources that may be available for the project.
Define project scope.
Create a project schedule and resource plan.
Monitor project progress and watch resource levels.
For example, let’s say you’re tasked with building a new website. There are plenty of steps required to get from start to finish. Here’s what the resource allocation process might look like at a high level:
Outline goals: who is the website for? Which company goals does this project involve (for your company and the client’s)?
Identify resources: who is available to work on this project?
Define scope: what is and isn’t part of this website project? What’s the definition of done? Of project success? What constitutes scope creep?
Project schedule: what steps or tasks will the project require, in what order?
Monitor: Is the project on schedule? Are the allocated resources sufficient to achieve the goals?
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Why is resource allocation important in project management?
If you’re involved in project management (whether it’s in your job title or not), getting a good handle on resource allocation can make a serious difference in the effectiveness of your project management work.
Here are three benefits of resource allocation that project managers can enjoy by improving their resource allocation skills.
Increased efficiency
It’s a story as old as work itself: To succeed, you need more than just access to resources. You need the right resources in the right amounts at the right time and in the right order.
10,000 farmers (human resources) with nothing to harvest (material resources) equals a disaster — maybe even a famine. But having no farmers to harvest a bumper crop is nearly as bad!
In the context of IT project management, the goal is to make the right people available when there’s work ready for them, and in sufficient numbers to get that work done on schedule.
By carefully planning your resource allocation, you’ll ensure less time is wasted in either direction, helping your team complete more projects successfully and on time.
Reduced costs
Effective resource allocation reduces waste in the form of underutilization, and reducing waste leads directly to reduced expenses.
Underutilization isn’t a complicated concept: You’re going to pay your software engineers either to do the work or to wait around until that work is ready for them. One of these is a lot more cost-effective than the other.
Another less obvious advantage is reducing overallocation. At first glance, it might seem like “getting more done with less” is a good way to reduce costs. And in the short term, it might be. But as overallocated team members grow fatigued, burnt out, and eventually demotivated, you’ll start seeing diminishing returns.
Resource allocation helps organizations understand needed workloads so they can strike the right balance, avoiding the financial expense of underutilization and the quality expense of overworked team members.
Improved project outcomes
When your project plan, project resources, and project schedule all align well thanks to effective resource allocation, you’ll tend to experience better project outcomes.
Why? Because time an engineer spends waiting around for work is time that engineer doesn’t spend on bug fixes and QA checks. And the money spent paying that engineer to wait for work is money your company can’t push toward improving the product.
Another underrated factor here is employee engagement: workers with no work to do tend to disengage, and that creates all sorts of quality problems if unaddressed. Gallup found that business units with high engagement levels were 14% more productive than others.
Deliverables tend to be higher in quality, which leads to better levels of stakeholder satisfaction, too.
Key strategies for optimizing resource allocation
Follow these four key strategies to improve your resource allocation efforts and achieve new levels of project success.
1. Assess project needs
Resource allocation starts in the project planning phase as you take a close look at what the project is going to need in order to succeed.
This starts with gathering information from stakeholders and agreeing on a project scope, but it doesn’t end there. You need to go further, breaking down what specific resources you’ll need to achieve the stated project objectives.
As you assess project needs, ask at least these questions:
Do I have access to the necessary skills to complete the project?
Do I have enough resource hours committed to complete the project on time?
Do I understand which resources are critical or most in demand?
Also, if you’re managing multiple projects or working with others to allocate limited resources across multiple projects, don’t forget to ask the most important question:
Where does this project fall in terms of priority?
A nice-to-have internal tool is usually a lower priority than a consumer-facing application that generates revenue. If you’re allocating resources for the internal tool, you may have to work around critical resource availability.
2. Use the right tools
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Resource allocation is a complex discipline that benefits greatly from the right set of tech and project management tools. Gantt charts can be extremely helpful in showing overlap between projects and resources. And using resource management software such as Teamwork.com brings a new layer of visibility into workloads, schedules, overlap, and more.
3. Balance available resources across projects
Many project managers must do some level of resource leveling and balancing. The typical IT project doesn’t take the full-time attention of every single team member. Some specializations are involved for just a fraction of the overall project timeline, which means they’re also involved in numerous other projects.
Managing resources across multiple projects is a challenge, but it’s easier when working with the right tools. You need visibility so you can see what everyone on the project team is currently tasked with doing — on your project and on any others the team member is assigned to. Without this kind of visibility, resource management is guesswork through and through, just hoping your specialists are available when you need them.
Teamwork.com excels here, too, giving you visibility across the organization to see availability information, scheduling and timeframes, and much more.
4. Monitor and adjust when necessary
No project plan will ever provide perfect clarity, and the situation on the ground will always change over the life of the project.
That’s why savvy project leaders must monitor their resource allocation throughout the course of a project and make adjustments when needed.
For example, project bottlenecks are a given. When they occur, you have several levers you can play with:
Assign more resources to the task creating the bottleneck.
Reallocate the resources downstream of the bottleneck.
Create new workflows that solve or bypass the bottleneck.
Make sure to build this resource allocation monitoring into your schedule. With so many responsibilities to keep track of, this one’s easy to miss.
Control more successful projects with resource allocation and Teamwork.com
A solid resource allocation strategy is one key to project success and profitability: it helps teams and project managers avoid miscommunication, navigate resource shortages, and better achieve their project goals.
Teamwork.com helps project teams visualize and understand resource utilization and availability of resources, enhancing both overall project planning and real-time decision-making.
It’s the tool project managers need for the entire scope of project and resource planning, from organizing project tasks to capacity planning and making resource allocation decisions.
Ready to create a better resource allocation plan so you can apply the best resources and skill sets to the right projects and tasks — without burnout or waste? Try Teamwork.com’s project management software suite free today.
More on resource management:
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