Page 169 - Project+

Generally speaking, when your organization has only one person or one

physical resource that can perform a task, you will be dealing with overallocation
issues.

I’m sorry to say there isn’t an easy answer for overallocated resources. This might
mean you’ll have to work with the senior management team to determine project
priorities. If the one and only resource needed for two competing projects can’t work
on both projects, management will have to decide which one has priority.

The opposite of overallocating team members is having benched resources. Benched

resources are those who have typically finished a project and are not yet assigned to a
new project or have a time gap between the finish and start of the new project.
Benched resources are costly to the organization because, well, they’re being paid to sit
around and wait for the next assignment. This scenario typically occurs in a projectized
organization.

The Equipment Was There, but the Electricity Wasn’t!

Jill is a project manager for a large corporation based in the Pacific Northwest. The
corporate managers decided to build a new building to house all the departments
in one place. The company planned to save money by reducing lease contracts
while increasing the level of efficiency because coworkers would be in closer
proximity to one another. Jill was put in charge of a project to move all the people

into the new building. The project would take about six months, and she would be
required to move 1,000 people in “move waves,” with a total of six waves.

Shortly after she received the project, Jill met with the building’s contractor to
discuss the location of the different departments and the power requirements and
to determine lighting diagrams for the cubicles throughout the building and the
data center. The contractor told Jill that, in the interest of saving money, the
corporate engineers had opted to reduce the number of electrical cables in the data

center, though he assured her he had planned for enough connections.

During the first-wave move, some, but not all, of the servers that were going into
the data center were delivered, and the various administrators were there to hook
them up. Jill was shocked to find out that all the electrical connections were used
up in the first wave! Even though there were more servers to come, she had
nowhere for them to connect to power. The assurance that the contractor gave her
was suddenly out the window.

Jill went back and inventoried the electrical requirements for the remaining
servers and discovered some had regular 15-amp requirements, others needed 20-

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