Resource Management Strategies When Skilled Resources Are in Short Supply

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Skill shortages have made resource management a significant challenge throughout the business world. That means, you need to ensure that your resources deliver the right output when it’s needed. Here are some tips to manage your skilled resources and make that happen.

  • Define workload priority with management. It’s rare to have a team member fully dedicated to your project; multi-tasking is commonplace. As you get team members assigned to your project, work with their managers to prioritize their assignments. That way, you and your team members will be in sync regarding the time they’re allocated to your project. For example, maybe a team member’s number one priority is to help the finance department close the monthly books, and their second priority is to work on your project. The best approach is to refrain from scheduling that team member on your project during the first week of every month. While inconvenient, it isn’t as painful as getting behind schedule because you scheduled your resource when they aren’t available.
  • Select team members whose skills match the difficulty of the task. You get the best results when a team member has skills that align with the difficulty of the work. If the task is too challenging, your team member could struggle, take too long, and become demoralized. Too easy and the task becomes more annoying than enjoyable—plus, this resource could be used to complete a more difficult task. In other words, the “best and brightest” staff member isn’t always the right person for a task.
  • Embrace positive conflict. Project managers sometimes avoid using team members who have a history of conflict with their colleagues. If the issue is a personality clash, it’s appropriate to find someone else. However, if the conflict relates to how to solve a problem or design a solution, conflicting opinions can generate more and better ideas. Although managing this positive conflict takes more time and effort, the project outcomes can be much better as a result. Take a page from the philosophy of former US President Abraham Lincoln; assemble a “team of rivals” to get the best project results.
  • Temporarily trade duties with team leaders or technical managers. Some team leaders and technical managers often wish they could drop their leadership and administrative duties and return to producing technical deliverables. Why not give them a chance to do just that? As a project manager, I’ve often temporarily taken administrative duties from a team leader or manager in exchange for them working on a technical task on my project. That gives a valuable resource the opportunity to practice their craft, and you get a better result for your project. It’s a win-win!

Do you have any tips or tricks for using skilled resources to the best advantage? Add them in the comments section!

For more about resource management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Procurement Management

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Procurement management is all about bringing control to acquisition of parts and skills required for projects. But it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

Find long-term partners. Organizations often require parts or skill-based services on an ongoing basis. Well-crafted Requests for Quotation (RFQ) or Requests for Proposal (RFP) enable vendors to share their skills and abilities as well as the culture and business approach they take to serve their clients. Your RFQ or RFP can not only reveal the best alternative for your current need and can also identify a go-to business partner for the future.

Identify other solution options. Speaking of RFPs and RFQs, send requests that encourages vendors to provide a response to your specific solution request along with alternative solutions. That way, you might discover ways to address business needs better. The information you get can draw attention to the potential for a long-term business partnership (see point 1). 

Discover skill mixes available in the marketplace. While working on a leading-edge technical project, a vendor introduced me to a technical-skill mix that I didn’t know existed. I worked with my procurement team to describe the technical installation skills I needed to implement a set of technical tools. The vendor proposed experts with both technical implementation expertise and business analysis background required to fully configure and implement our tools more efficiently than if we did it ourselves. This skill mix decreased the project’s forecasted duration and made for a stronger business case to launch the project.

Support an efficient supply chain. Supply chain challenges are everywhere today, affecting virtually every business. The entry point to your supply chain is the vendor(s) who provide parts and products for your project. Being mindful of your supply chain requirements and performing sound procurement management helps you select vendors who can minimize or eliminate supply chain issues that can impact your project outcomes.

If you have other benefits you have obtained from procurement management, share them with your fellow project managers by posting in the comment section.

For more about procurement management, check out Oliver Yarbrough’s Project Management Foundations: Procurement course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Risk Management

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Project management disciplines such as risk management bring control to a project. In addition to the well-known benefits of these disciplines, they provide other benefits that aren’t often discussed or recognized. Here are a few additional benefits that risk management provides:

Encourages optimism. Thinking about what could go wrong increases optimism? It seems counter-intuitive, and yet it does! Plans for responding to risks can encourage the team. Whatever may arise, you have already identified an action to take! In addition, planning for positive risks (also called opportunities) can increase the chance of good things happening and ensure that you make the most of them when they do. That’s certainly cause for optimism! 

Reduces pressure. Project managers face enough pressure without having to develop solutions to issues on a moment’s notice. With risk management, you will have pre-planned responses to events that occur: you’re ready to execute the plan so the team can take action quickly.

Even if a problem arises that isn’t in your risk management plan, a team that’s used to managing risk can jump in to discuss alternatives and develop responses. You do not have to deal with it alone!

Identifies possibilities. Productive risk identification and response planning meetings can unearth more than doom and gloom responses. You might launch risk-reducing actions proactively, which not only addresses risks, but can also increase project value. For example, say you proactively engage a skilled resource to reduce risk. That person’s skill and experience might uncover possible solutions that expand the value the project delivers to the business.

Increases focus on outcomes. Focusing the project team on risk regularly during status meetings keeps the project purpose front of mind. While project team members naturally focus on their specific tasks, risk management provides focus on what might jeopardize project outcomes, and how team members can work with each other and management to produce project outcomes as planned.

Have you come across other benefits of risk management that aren’t typically discussed?

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Cost Management

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Photo by Micheile on Unsplash

Besides controlling the spending for a project, cost management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of cost management: 

Filters out wannabe stakeholders. Project managers should embrace the phrase “you gotta pay to play!” In other words, if stakeholders want their requirements considered for the project, they need to provide funding to deliver what they require. With cost management practices, you can ensure that the project receives acceptable cost-benefit ratios from every request. It also helps ensure unfunded requirements won’t burden your project.

Provides leverage to control change. Cost management can help prevent scope creep! Change request processing includes evaluating schedule and cost impact. That cost management aspect of change management means you have the data you need to say no to project stakeholders when they come up with ideas they can’t cost-justify. 

Enables managing project speed or agile velocity. You know stakeholders are fond of asking for projects to be delivered sooner. Delivering the full project scope more quickly typically means higher cost. You can control the pace and integrity of delivery by asking whether funding is available for the early delivery and whether that extra cost makes sense. Without committed additional funding, fast delivery will skew your triple constraints and move your project status to yellow — or even red.

Similar approaches exist in agile environments. Because cost and time start are initially fixed based on the number of staff and planned sprints, delivering more features means more people or more time, both of which cost more. Before speeding up feature delivery, make sure the stakeholders can justify the request. 

Helps prevent inappropriate projects from being selected. When a client launches a project without proper cost management, they’re likely to discover that the project outcomes don’t save time or money. Proper cost management can stop “dud” projects that aren’t worth the money or effort. In addition, it supports the tactic, “if you’re going to fail, fail fast.”

Have you come across other benefits of cost management in your projects? If so, add them in the comments section.

For more about project cost management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Budgets course.