What resource management challenges are typical for a multi-project setting? And how can they be addressed? Let’s delve into these issues in the article.
4 essential resource management challenges
A multi-project environment is a complex system of interdependent activities. What makes its management most difficult is dependencies between projects: they can share human, material, and financial resources, have overlapping activities and due dates. In addition, a multi-project setting involves dealing with a huge amount of data that has to be stored, managed, and properly interpreted to achieve the intended results. Let’s review typical resource management challenges in a multi-project environment in more detail.
Staffing concurrent projects
A lack of resources becomes a common challenge when you need to staff projects in a multi-project setting. In a great number of cases, it is caused by the specificity of a multi-project environment and management mistakes. This includes the following factors.
- Resource conflicts.
When multiple projects are running in parallel, resource conflicts can become a real challenge. One employee can be required for several initiatives at the same time, which is a direct consequence of resource dependencies between projects.
- Poor resource planning.
Before starting a new project, a resource manager should have an idea of resource demand for this project (how much capacity and what competences are required), compare it to available employees’ competences and capacity, and find ways to bridge them if necessary. Otherwise, it will result in last-minute hiring which actually won’t solve the problem immediately – it takes time before a newcomer can deliver the required output.
- Wrong priorities.
This mostly refers to project portfolio management. When allocating resources to projects, you need to know which of them generate the biggest business value and require critical employees first and foremost.
Assigning the right resources to the right tasks
To ensure efficient work on projects, you should assign employees to tasks that correspond to their competence levels. However, it can be challenging for the following reasons.
- A lack of skilled employees.
Some industries (aerospace and defense, automotive, and others that deal with innovations and technology) require digital workforce to staff their projects. But at the moment, the competition for tech-savvy employees is very high, which makes it difficult to find them as quickly as needed.
- Office politics.
Among other things, this phenomenon can affect resource allocation decisions – when resources are assigned to a project that addresses the needs of influential stakeholders with no regard to its relationships with other initiatives.
Poor visibility of resource-related data
By resource visibility we mean easy access to the essential data used in the resource management process – resource allocation and capacity planning, tracking resources’ progress, and assessing their performance. It’s the data on people’s competences, capacity, availability, workload, and output.
In a multi-project environment with numerous employees and activities, resource-related data visibility is crucial. And what is even more important is that there should be a single source of truth for a project and resource manager, the project team, and stakeholders. Inability to see the big picture of resource-related processes and siloed data make multi-project resource management incredibly challenging and ineffective.
Uneven workload distribution
When there are multiple projects in the pipeline, it’s extremely difficult to staff each of them with the required employees and at the same time keep their workload balanced. As a rule, you have a limited number of resources and a great number of tasks to complete. In addition, most of the resources have already been booked by other projects. In this case, it’s very easy to snow them under with work, which is the most unfavorable scenario: overloaded people are not only inefficient, but can also hamper the work of their colleagues and the whole project environment.
There can be another problem. Sometimes, the workload can be distributed unevenly: while some team members are overloaded, the others are idle, which significantly reduces overall productivity. The main cause for uneven workload distribution is a lack of correct prioritization and a discrepancy between people’s capacity and load.
If you notice that your resources don’t deliver the desired output or show any signs of poor performance, it’s time to check the following things:
- Have you identified project priorities correctly?
- Have you allocated resources with regard to the relevant data on their availability?
- Do the employees’ tasks correspond to their competence levels?
- Is the team members’ workload distributed according to their capacity? Aren’t they overloaded or idle?
Spotting the trouble area will become the first step in fixing the issues. But most likely you’ll require the assistance of the right resource management solution – it will provide you with accurate data, automate some RM processes, and contribute to more effective resource management. Let’s examine how a resource management tool’s functionality helps cope with the above-mentioned resource management challenges.
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