Last Updated: January 20, 2022
Acquire Team Workflow
In this section in Executing the Project project management phase of Executing of project management, resource management is the first Activity. in this section and it is perhaps the most illustrative functionality in Microsoft Project and, at the same time, the most neglected by users.
Certainly, resource management is one of the top three deployment goals for organizations that decide to use Microsoft Project. However, because resource management requires a good understanding of the software, less than 20% of the millions of Microsoft Project users can do meaningful resource management.
The first step in this Activity is to replace skill or generic resources with the people who will be doing the work. The final group of people becomes the project team; they each have a responsibility for their assigned work and for collaborating. In today's work culture, long gone is the notion that some individuals work in a silo; collaboration is the norm. Once people replace skill resources in the plan, availability becomes more of an issue, and more attention to defining their availability is warranted. People in most organizations are pushed and pulled in different directions, there is competition for their attention, and they get sick, have vacations, and are presented with other opportunities. Managing workloads is a constant activity. Once availability is defined, individual and group workloads should be closely examined.
If a resource is overallocated during a period, the project manager can select from three choices to address the issue. Those choices are:
Replace the resource with an equally skilled resource that is available.
Reschedule the activities that are contributing to the overallocation.
Ignore the overallocation.
Ignoring overallocation doesn't seem like a reasonable strategy, and perhaps a better word might be to negotiate. A resource cannot be in two places simultaneously, and they can't do the humanly impossible, but people tend to balance their workloads. During a heavy workweek, a resource might decide to put off other responsibilities for a few days to complete critical activities. Likely, that would be something the project manager negotiates with the team member.
Last, all teams need to decide how they will work together. Among other team dynamics and responsibilities, this includes using Microsoft Project.