It’s a constant struggle. You don’t get resources, then finally get them way too late in the process, just to get them taken away from you again when you finally got things running. Why is it that project managers usually are the ones who need to argue to populate a project with a team? That I don’t know. But I do know that even though it shouldn’t be up to you it’ll probably will be.
When you don’t have them
In best-case scenarios in project planning, you have a project with the activities already known and thereby the roles needed to execute them along the way. With this, you can do your resource plan and then ask relevant resource owners for the people needed and estimates on when to do it. But there are way more projects where you don’t know all the activities beforehand or things come up that were unforeseen and need to be solved. With the resources you don’t have. Hence, you are usually left with the following options:
- Call in favors from colleagues
- Befriend resource owners
- Do it yourself
The correct way to go about it is to escalate this in a resource meeting or to a steering group. After all – it’s one of your steering group’s most important tasks to populate the project with people. A more common way to solve this is to start calling in favors by people in the organizations. This solves the task short term but when everybody starts doing this, it messes up people’s schedules and time. Sometimes you might even have colleagues who want to help out and takes it upon themselves to do this on top of their other job at evenings. That also solves the task short term and you just need to find a way to report the time for that person or fix the cost for it. Different organizations have very different cultures about this. Sometimes, you even turn to the solution which no project manager should do – doing it yourself. Don’t get me wrong, there are projects where you might have several roles, that’s life. But if you start the project by doing the doing, you will never get out of it and the project will suffer.
When you had them
You had a team and everything started off happily. Then all of a sudden you don’t get certain people’s attention as much, the communication starts slacking, people miss deadlines or it’s just official that “we need to borrow your team member” and woof the person was gone. It’s slightly different from when you haven’t started the project or something unforeseen has emerged. This is far more frustrating. You had something, committed to something, and still have something to deliver upon. But now with fewer people to deliver upon it.
It’s not fair but it’s reality. Once you get over the frustration you can fall back to the bullets as if you didn’t have them. Sometimes, just sometimes, we get the chance to argue for our project. After all, you are the ambassador and the facilitator for this project. If you can make it happen so you get to keep the same people on your project, then by all means put in the energy to do so. Some arguments to use could be:
- Consistency in resources will mean consistent speed. Any change in this and you’ll need to plan for handover and ramp-up time, thus moving gates or agreed deadlines.
- To ensure a quality level, the same project team needs to be in place. Details of history are hard to move between persons. Change of people evidently means a risk of losing quality.
- Team members will work better once part of a team with an objective that they are allowed to finish. Switching assignments or projects too often lowers the team members’ morale. After all, it’s people we are talking about, not “resources”.
The alternative
The alternative to all of this is to start putting the responsibility where it belongs. Many of us are so engaged in the work and have driven personalities that we take it upon ourselves to fix this. But the role of a project manager isn’t to do all the parts, and the burden of success or failure doesn’t lay solely on your shoulders. You need to be flexible and creative to find a way to reach goals, yes, but not you’re not an acrobat and it’s not a circus. If it is, then it might be time to reconsider your role.
When sharing resources, even though the projects might have different objectives or different end customers, they are being done for a company where we all share the overall same objective. Therefore, it’s in the business interest that project managers don’t start to steal people between the projects or it becomes a culture of “best friend gets the most attention”. After all, everybody wants us all to succeed and all projects to be finalized, so we need to take a step back.
- Have the insight that even though it’s your project, you don’t own it.
- Escalate the situation. Project sponsors or owners together with the steering group need to get the information and you need to get an answer from them on what they can or cannot support.
- Communicate that the project pauses and what the consequences will be.
- Pause it. I know it hurts and might even feel like a failure, but just do it. Your role is to communicate the prerequisites and results even when they are not happily ever after.
- The business needs to have a process or priority meeting where everybody agrees on what to focus on. In small companies, this is much easier to call for, so don’t sweat it if it doesn’t happen.
