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SECTION 4

RESOURCE AND
WORKFORCE

MANAGEMENT

Resource scheduling is a strange fish. We all know that efficient workforce
planning and the scheduling of resources is critical to project success. Mil-
lions of dollars are spent on tools to aid in this function, and untold hours are de-
voted to developing pragmatic resource plans.

The embarrassing truth is that much of this effort is wasted. First of all, when I
survey project managers about their use of resource scheduling systems, I get al-
most a zero reply. That is, hardly anyone is using these capabilities, even when
they have them. When I ask why, one answer is that it takes too much effort to
learn the system and to describe the assignment details to the computer. But even
more frequent is the complaint that these systems don’t deliver a usable solution.
Personally, I have conducted considerable testing of resource scheduling systems
over the past 40 years, and my findings are in agreement with theirs. However, I
do think that there is enough to be gained from using resource scheduling sys-
tems even if they fall short of perfection.

So we proceed to describe the basic elements of such resource scheduling sys-
tems and to discuss the issues involved with getting some benefit from their use.
In Chapter 4.1, we present An Overview of the Different Elements of Resource
Management. Here we describe the various components of a resource scheduling
system and how they work. We cover both traditional and some experimental ap-
proaches and comment on their effectiveness.

Resource management (RM) means different things to different people in the
organization. So, in Chapter 4.2, we take a role-based look at managing resources
in a project-driven organization. We look at resource management from the
needs of managers, participants, and other stakeholders.

During the first four decades of what we have come to call Modern Project

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