The Benefits of Dedicated Resources

Dedicated project team members might appear expensive, but they provide significant benefits, which might reduce your project costs:

Focused responsibilities. Dedicated people aren’t distracted by day-to-day operational issues. They can fully examine the project deliverables and understand how the project is proceeding so they can deliver what’s best for the project. You get better outcomes and reduce rework.

The right skills for the job. Operational knowledge is important, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the person has the best skillset to create project deliverables. Recruiting people with the most appropriate skills and assigning them to project tasks can optimize your project delivery. Contractors can join the project as dedicated resources for only the time needed to accomplish their tasks, which can reduce project overhead costs.

Greater efficiency. Dedicated, skilled team members typically take fewer hours to produce their deliverables because they don’t have to multi-task. Multi-tasking wastes time while not making progress — like catching up when you reopen a novel after putting it down. Operational personnel who also produce project deliverables are multi-tasking: they need to re-acclimatize themselves each time they switch between operational and project work. This wastes time and increases costs.

Continued access to operational knowledge. Assigning dedicated team members to your project doesn’t necessarily mean losing operational knowledge. Your dedicated team members can interview or shadow operational personnel to obtain first-hand knowledge of business operations and then apply that knowledge to your project deliverables.

Quicker delivery. The efficiencies of dedicated resources can mean a shorter project. Your business value is realized more quickly, and you can move on to your next project – and deliver more business value sooner!

To learn more, watch Chris Croft’s course Managing Resources Across Project Teams.