Project Management

Project management: Plan ahead for critical resource contingencies

Tom Mochal provides some examples of where you should plan ahead in a project.

Your risk management process allows you to evaluate and respond to high-level project risks. Some of these risks involve project resources and require that you consider ahead of time how you will respond if you need to replace or add resources. In fact, in some cases, you must actually plan ahead to understand what the contingency resources look like and how you'll get them if they're needed. This contingency planning could affect either labor or non-labor resources. Here are some examples of where you should plan ahead.


On many projects, if you find that work is taking longer than you anticipated, you might have the flexibility to ask for additional time and budget. However, if the deadline date is critical and can't be moved, you may not have time to look for new resources to get back on schedule. Likewise, if a member of your team leaves, you may need to find a replacement in very short order.

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When deadlines are firm and the project deliverables are critical, you need to have some plans in place for finding resources when needed. For example, let's look at the YR2K projects of a few years ago. If you were entering the final six months of 1999 and needed more resources, you would not have time to spend three months finding people. You should already have had a plan for acquiring resources on short notice. This may have meant having employees or contract people in reserve to allow you to make staffing changes quickly.


A high incremental cost of resources. You may have resources that are less expensive when purchased in bulk, but very expensive when purchased incrementally. For instance, if the solution you are building requires new hardware, you may find that the price per unit is less as you purchase more units. Let’s say that you estimate you will need 100 routers, plus or minus 10. Your hardware vendor may give you a very attractive price for buying in bulk--perhaps 50 or 60% of the unit price. In this case, you may choose to purchase the full 110 now and have ten units in reserve. You would do this because the price to purchase the extra ten units now (as a part of the bulk order) is much less expensive that having to purchase ten units later, when the incremental cost would be much higher.

Long lead times

Long lead times for specialty resources. Sometimes there's a long lead-time to acquire hard-to-find specialty resources. If the need is critical enough, you may need to know ahead of time how to find these people on short notice if needed. For example, you may need experts in some obscure tool. One way to plan ahead is to work with the vendor to have resources identified that can be made available to you in an emergency. If an expert on your team quits, you will not be stuck. You would have already worked out a deal to have substitute resources available on short notice--even if only short-term.

You can see that not all projects require this sort of advanced planning. However, on some projects it's absolutely critical. The project manager should understand ahead of time whether there are resource risks such as those described above. In those cases, once you discover that you need these resources it may be too late to find them and still complete the project on time and within budget. So, do what a smart project manager would do--plan ahead of time and understand where you will go to acquire these critical resources when needed. 


I work for a state government, and we have a Governor (ironically, a Democrat) who is pushing to cut the total number of state employees by nearly 25%. I's hard enough to get good IT people to work for the state in the first place, but doing it in this enviroment is nearly impossible. And if we lose someone, for whatever reason, odds are their position will be cut, rather than they will be replaced. (This is how much of the cuts so far have been done...) What do folks you recommend for managing the risk of losing personnel in this sort of environment? Is "just put up and shut up" acceptable, or is there something else we can do? As an employee, I know I'm about at the limit of "just lumping it", and I expect others are as well. Fortunately, we have a union, and while this is a mixed blessing sometimes, in the worst case we can just play "dumb employees", do our 40 hours, and management can deal with the results. However, I'd really rather not get to that point... so any thoughts on this would be most appreciated...!


This is a difficult situation. I am assunimg you have some form of leadership role. I am in a similar position, although we are not cutting we are not replacing people when they leave. Work loads are getting heavier and staff is getting more frustrated. You can't stop people from leaving if they find better opportunities. But you can do a few things to help those that remain, including yourself. 1. What can you stop doing? Most IT shops do a lot of stuff that the business units or user areas ought to do. Can the users be trained to use there tools correctly and take some of the annoying problems away from IT. 2. Make sure you are cross training your folks, You do not want to be in the situation where one individual has all the knowledge of a system. That could leave you an dyour department scrambling if that staff memeber leaves. 3. Make sure your folks know you understand their plight. Communicate with them what is going on and also what you are certain and uncertain of. Try to get through the whining sessions and back to doing the important jobs that you have. 4. Help your staff learn to say no to projects and requests that do not bring value to the organization. Good luck and remember that IT is not the end all and be all of life.

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