Chapter 29 -- Managing Project Files

Chapter 6

As soon as you're assigned as manager of the project, you might already have certain resources in mind whom you know would be right for this project. As the scope becomes more defined, and you develop the task list along with the milestones and deliverables, you're likely to have even more ideas. If you have specific people in mind, you might start inquiring about their availability. You might also start investigating sources, specifications, and prices for material and equipment.

By the time you develop the durations of the tasks, you have very concrete information in front of you—you now know exactly which tasks need to be done and what kinds of resources you need to do them.

There might be a team in place already—the full-time members of a department who are waiting to sink their teeth into a good project. There might be no team at all, and you'll have to hire some people and contract others. Or you might have a core staff, but for this project you'll need to contract additional temporary workers to fill out the skills needed for the team.

You can add the names of resources who will be working on this project as you acquire them. These might be the names of actual people. Or these might be generic resource names that describe the skills and competencies needed to fulfill the task. Where applicable, you can also enter the names of equipment or material resources that will also help implement the project. You can also enter additional resource information, such as availability, cost, and notes.

How Many Resources Do You Need?

Although you know the tasks that need to be done and the kinds of resources you need to do them, you might not know how many of a particular type of resource you need just yet.

Here's the process: First you identify the tasks that need to be done. Second you identify the resources needed to do those tasks. Third you assign resources to the tasks. At that point, you can see if the resulting schedule meets your target date or target budget.

You need to have tasks in place to find out how many resources you need. You also need resources to assign to those tasks to create an accurate schedule and cost estimate. After assigning resources, if the schedule calculates a finish date later than the target finish date, you might have to go back and add more resources to your team. Or if the project costs are over budget and you haven't even started work yet, you might have to forgo additional resources or scramble to replace expensive resources with less expensive ones.

As you can see, tuning your project plan to get the right number of resources to meet your schedule, costs, and workload requirements is an iterative process. You might need to go through several cycles of refinement before you arrive at the perfect plan.

For more information about refining the project plan to meet a target date or budget, see Chapter 9, "Checking and Adjusting the Project Plan."