21 October, 2024

Project Resource Management: Part 1 of Your Comprehensive Guide


Nothing gets done unless people do it. And those people need tools, materials, and a place to work. So, resources are vital to project delivery, and that makes Project Resource Management an essential skill set for any Project Manager.

It’s easy to focus on human resources; the people who deliver a project. But there are a wide range of other resource types too. So, we have split our guide into two parts:

  1. In this part, we’ll survey the breadth of Project Resource Management.
  2. In the second part, we will focus on the human resources and the people aspect of Project Resource Management

This is not to say that we won’t mention people in this article. Of course we will. But, for a deep dive into Project Human Resource Management, you’ll need to read Part 2 as well.

Here’s Our Agenda

Project Resource Management: Part 1 of Your Comprehensive Guide

Resource Management is a big topic, so I have divided it up into six major sections:

  1. Definition: What is Project Resource Management?
  2. What are Project Resources?
  3. The Challenges of Project Resource Management
  4. Responding to the Project Resource Management Challenges: The Planning Process
  5. Boosting Your Project Resource Effectiveness
  6. The Trends that the PMI’s PMBOK Identifies in Project Resource Management

Then, take a look at our Guide that focuses on Project Human Resource Management.

So, let’s start by defining our terms…

Definition: What is Project Resource Management?

Let’s get into it by defining what we mean by ‘Project Resource Management’. It means identifying, assigning, and overseeing the project’s resources. Here are some formal definitions.

First, the PMI:

‘Project Resource Management includes the processes to identify, acquire, and manage the resources needed for the successful completion of the project.’

The Project Management Institute (PMI), in the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 6th Edition (the PMBOK Guide)

Although the 6th edition of the PMBOK Guide was superseded by the 7th edition in 2021, PMI retains the content of the older edition as part of its PMIstandards+ website.

Next, the APM:

‘Resource management comprises the acquisition and deployment of the internal and external resources required to deliver the project, programme or portfolio.’

The Association for Project Management (APM), in the APM Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition (APMBoK)

Finally, the IAPM:

‘Resource management as part of project management serves to identify, allocate and use project participants (resources) as efficiently as possible.’

The International Association of Project Managers (IAPM) adopts a definition from the German edition of Wikipedia
Notice that this definition focuses exclusively on people – unless you are happy to think of a lathe, a laptop, or a licence as a ‘participant’.

I think you probably get the picture!

The PMI’s PMBOK Guide and Project Resource Management

By far the most detailed description of Project Resource Management was the one in the PMI’s PMBOK Guide, sixth edition. And it is also the articulation that is likely to be most widely used among our readers.

Here is a table of the six Resource Management Processes in the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition

9.1 Plan Resource ManagementThis is the planning process and sets out the approach you will take to PRM
9.2 Estimate Activity ResourcesDetermining your requirements: what resources you’ll need and the quantities
9.3 Acquire ResourcesHow you will get the resources you need onto your project
9.4 Develop TeamCreating the team capabilities and culture you need.
This is Human Resource Management and we’ll look at this in more detail in Part 2 of this guide.
9.5 Manage TeamDay-to-day and performance management, along with your team leadership role.
This is Human Resource Management and we’ll look at this in more detail in Part 2 of this guide.
9.6 Control ResourcesMonitor and control processes to keep your resource availability matching demand from upcoming activities.

Project Resources are about Two Things…

There are two reasons we need resources in projects – whether people, assets, or materials. These are:

  1. Capacity – resources allow us to get more done than we can do alone
    1. People provide extra minds and bodies to get things done
    2. Tools and equipment amplify our efficiency
    3. and the money to pay for them
  2. Capability – resources allow us to do things we cannot otherwise do
    1. People bring new skills, experience, and expertise
    2. Tools and equipment allow us to do things people cannot
    3. The materials to build deliverables from
    4. and the money to pay for them

What are Project Resources?

So, if resources are there to help us do more than we can do alone, what sorts are there? There are five types:

  • Consumables and materials
    These can be:
    • Finished goods
    • Components
    • Raw materials, which can be un-processed natural materials or lightly-processed feedstock
  • Capital Assets
    These can be:
    • Land and property, or space and accommodation
    • Tools, equipment, plant, and machinery
  • Intangible Assets
    These can be:
    • Methods, processes, systems, procedures, and even knowledge and ideas
    • Software (which may be classed as:
      • A Capital asset if software licenses are bought outright (or developed to specification)
      • A Consumable asset if the software is rented on a recurring license, or as a Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription
    • Data – the raw information we need, to achieve certain objectives
  • Energy
    Yes, energy is ‘intangible’. And yes, it is a ‘consumable’ resource. But I think it is sufficiently different to merit its own entry. I’d also note that very few project types will need to account for energy in their resource management.
  • People
    We’ll talk about Human resources in this Part 1 guide, but cover how best to manage this special resource type in Part 2. e involve people for the work they can do and the expertise they can bring.
  • Money
    Perhaps most important of all, money is the master resource. You can trade Money for any of the other resources.
    In economic theory, this is ‘capital’, but in accounting terms, we distinguish between capital and revenue. And it is subject to its own rules. Therefore, we have a dedicated guide to Project Cost Management that you may be interested to read.

What about Time, Mike?

I’m glad you asked! Many people regard time as a resource. I do not. It behaves in a fundamentally different way to the resources I have listed above.

All of those resources can be set aside and stored for future use. You can draw them down when you need them, and stop using them when you don’t. Time is not like that. This is why project scheduling and schedule management are separate disciplines within Project Management.

So, is it wrong to think of Time as a resource?

I think it is unhelpful, but I won’t go so far as to say it’s ‘wrong’. Other sources may treat time as a resource. But, as always, what matters is that you understand the issue, think it through for yourself, and reach your own conclusion. Once you have done that, be consistent in your usage within your project.

Internal and External Resources

It’s also worth noting another useful distinction: between internal and external resources.

Internal Resources

Internal resources belong either to you or to someone else within your organization. Therefore accessing them is usually via allocation or negotiation. And that makes negotiation skills an essential part of your toolkit. So do take a look at our guide:

A number of factors can influence how easy you’ll find it to access internal resources, and the strategy that you are best off adopting. These include:

  • Prevailing organizational culture, politics, and hierarchical structures.
  • Policies and processes. Often having a PMO (Project, Program or Portfolio Management Office) in place can ease your way to accessing much-needed resources.
  • Economic and trading conditions. When these are adverse, people tend to hold on tightly to any resources they can control.
  • Competing calls for resources from other initiatives, projects, and programs.
  • Your political acumen and negotiating skill – and those of your counter-party!

As a result, it can sometimes be easier to access external resources…

External Resources

External resources are available. They just don’t belong to your organization. As a result, you’ll need to borrow, hire, or buy them.

The first step will be to specify and source what you need. Then, assuming you are unable to borrow them, or barter services or favors, you will need to procure them.

The Challenges of Project Resource Management

It’s time to get into the main challenges of Project Resource Management. It’s all about getting it ‘right’:

  • Securing the right resources…
  • in the right quantities…
  • to the right specifications, quality standards, or with the right capabilities…
  • in the right place…
  • at the right time.

Therefore, this suggests a number of challenges:

  • Availability
  • Estimation
  • Conflicting commitments
  • Balancing workload (in the case of people)
  • Delivery
  • Timing

I will leave the challenge of securing an advantageous price and contract terms to our article on procurement.

Why Does Good Project Resource Management Matter?

In Appendix 1 of the PMI’s 2016 Pulse of the Profession Report: ‘The High Cost of Low Performance’, there is a powerful table. It shows the causes to which respondents ascribed project failure. PMI asked them to select up to three primary causes. The figures include:

  • Resource dependency: 26%
  • Inadequate resource forecasting: 26%
  • Limited/taxed resources: 22%

These are far from the biggest causes of failure – they are in the lower half of the table. But it does show that at least a quarter of respondents believe poor Project Resource Management was a primary contributor to a project’s failure.

At least a quarter of respondents believe poor Project Resource Management was a primary contributor to a project's failure. Share on X

Responding to the Project Resource Management Challenges: The Planning Process

The poor performance a Project Resource Management means we’re going to need a rigorous process for Project Resource Planning. I want to keep it as a simple four-step process.

The Resource Planning Process


The four steps are:

  1. Understand the activities needed to deliver your project
  2. From the activities, extract your resource requirements
  3. Apply your resources to the activities
  4. Balance your resource usage to optimize your efficiency

Then, we can manage our resources. We’ll look at these one at a time.

Understand the activities needed to deliver your project

The route to understanding your activities is your Work Breakdown Structure.

If you use the US-based approach, you’ll use your WBS as the basis for listing the activities needed for each product. If you use the UK-based approach, then your WBS will directly list those activities.

From the Activities, Extract your Resource Requirements

Either way, against each activity you’ll be able to list the types of resources you’ll require – people, materials, assets, or intangible, and the length of time (duration) you will need them for.

Resource Type

For documenting resource types, text forms will be the most useful:

  • capability assessments for people – these may include skill or experience levels you require or prefer
  • specifications for other resources

Duration

For the durations, you will need to understand the craft of estimating and, guess what? Yup, we have a guide:

You may also like: Make Your Project Estimation More Reliable, Using the PERT Method

Apply your Resources to the activities

There are three parts to this step:

  1. Sourcing the resources you need, which we discussed above, under Internal and External resources.
  2. Allocating those resources to the task. There are some great tools to help you with this, which include:
    1. RACI Chart, for allocating people to key roles
    2. Linear Responsibility Chart – LRC (also called a Resource Allocation Matrix – RAM) – similar to a RACI chart, but slightly better – and you can use it for material and asset resources too
    3. Work Package Descriptions – to help with the accountability of allocations of people to activities
    4. Resource Breakdown Structure to map (material and asset) resources onto WBS tasks
    5. Organization Breakdown Structure to map human resources onto WBS tasks
  3. Scheduling the deployment of the resources in conjunction with your master project schedule

The links above will take you to five-minute videos explaining the terms.

Balance your resource usage to optimize your efficiency

To get the most efficient allocation of resources, you will need to balance their utilization, using resource smoothing and resource-leveling. Note that the steps of applying resources and balancing them up are iterative. You’ll rarely get the best allocation at the first pass.

We will examine these soon…

When you finish the planning, you’ll move into delivery of your project, and active management of your project resources.

The PMBOK Guide’s Plan Resource Management Process

The PMBOK Guide is full of meta processes. These are processes that oversee the delivery of active processes.

In the case of Project Resource Management, it’s the Plan Resource Management Process. Therefore, this is where you will determine and document how you will do what we have just described, above.

The inputs to the process will be your suite of planning documents. And the outputs will an updated set, with the addition of:

  • Your Resource Management Plan
  • A Team Charter

Project Resource Planning Methods

There are four key Resource Planning techniques:

  1. Allocation
    Matching your resources to your requirements (the activities) and then setting the assignments. This includes the all-important briefing stage. If you are wondering how allocation differs from delegation, check out our video.
  2. Scheduling
    Placing your project activities in the timeline, to optimize the use of the resources you have allocated to them. You will work with the team leaders and the people to whom you have allocated the work, when doing this.
  3. Smoothing
    Moving resources deployment to different points in the schedule, to make more efficient use of them. Here, the timeline is your priority.
  4. Leveling
    Spreading out the duration of tasks or activities, to avoid over-allocation of resources. It improves the speed and efficiency of delivery, with resource utilization as your priority.

Here’s a video that describes resource leveling and smoothing.

Digital Resource Planning Tools

When you have finished the planning, you’ll move into delivery of your project, and active management of your project resources. For example, in marketing agencies, it involves balancing creative talent with digital tools and market research. Agencies must allocate these resources efficiently while adapting to client needs and market trends. This requires agile planning and transparent communication to ensure project success and client satisfaction.

Boosting Your Project Resource Effectiveness

We are now nearing the end of this guide. So, I want to offer six of my personal tips to help you make the most effective use of your project resources.

Tip 1: Multi-tasking Sucks

Let’s face it. People are rubbish at multi-tasking. And serial mono-tasking is inefficient. To get the best from your people, schedule them to work one work package at a time, so they can focus 100 percent on that set of tasks.

Tip 2: Don’t Forget Non-productive and Non-project Time

When you are planning your resources, think through the messy ends of tasks. For:

  • Materials: delivery times, unpacking, checking, sorting, storing, and inventorying
  • Plant and equipment: delivery, installation, commissioning, and training.
    And also don’t forget to schedule planned maintenance, and allow for reactive maintenance in your schedule and budget contingency.
  • Software: installation, configuration, migrations, updates, and training
  • People: holidays, breaks, illness, other commitments

Tip 3: Soft- and Hard-scheduling

For each planning element, determine what will serve you better:

  • Soft Scheduling
    …for example, telling a team member you will need three days of their time in week 8, but allowing them the flexibility to work as they choose within the constraints you set.
  • Hard Scheduling
    …for example, telling them that you will need them on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in week 8, giving no flexibility in your constraints.

Tip 4: Motivation and Development

Never forget your leadership responsibilities. You are responsible for the learning and morale of your team members. And, of course, for their safety and welfare.

Tip 5: Focus on Critical Resources

When you are planning, keep a focus on critical resources that are in short supply. These are resources that, if they are not available when you need them, will cause delays to the project. This is just as you would do in schedule planning, where you would focus on critical path activities that can cause delays to key milestone dates.

Tip 6: Also Focus on Dependency Risk

There will be some resources, ‘key resources’, upon which you will be highly dependent. Too much will be at risk if those resources are compromised. This could be key:

  • person risk – people with special skills and expertise, for example
  • component risk – components that cannot be replaced with alternatives, for example
  • asset risk – assets without which a part of the project cannot be delivered, for example.

I want to end this guide by pointing out some of the trends and emerging practices in resource management. I think we need to consider five main domains of change, in the way we manage project resources. Some are more mature than others. They are:

Agile and Adaptive frameworks, toolsets, and mindsets

This feels pretty mature and I see few innovations emerging at the moment. However, there is no doubt that the rise of agile in the first two decades of the century brought us tools and methods that inform all good project-based working today. And, while the mindsets it encourages are not new, they certainly enhance our focus on self-organizing teams and servant leadership.

Neuroscience and improved ways of understanding people

In an earlier version of this article, I referred to the importance of Emotional Intelligence as a growing trend. I think we have reached saturation of that concept for the moment. Most established project professionals are familiar with its ideas and other is little new work reaching us.

However, over the last few years, researchers and communicators have taken our understanding of people at work up a notch with the introduction of ideas from neuroscience. This will continue to grow, with the power to enhance our capabilities.

For more, Power of Neuroscience: How to Harness it for Project Success

Behavioral economics and enhanced understanding of decision-making

The key parts of procuring resources of all kinds are in specifying what you need and making a decision about which option best serves that nbee. Our understanding of how to make a good decision continues to grow, as have insights into our biases and how others can influence them.

For more, Your Essential Guide to How to Make Robust Project Decisions

Virtual (remote) and hybrid working among project teams

For me, the big challenge is learning how best to manage and lead virtual, or remote (physically dispersed), teams – or hybrids of this and a co-located core team. Unfortunately, here, the research and understanding lag well behind our needs. Best practices are largely based on overlaying technology tools onto established team management processes. I cannot help feeling that there is more to learn.

We have two feature articles and a video:

The rise of Artificial Intelligence based resource estimation, allocation, and management tools

We cannot ignore the biggest pressure for change in project-based working; artificial intelligence. It is way too soon to predict where things may stabilize, but it is clear that AI tools will increasingly be able to offer better solutions to:

  • identifying and calculating resource needs
  • optimizing resource allocation and scheduling
  • monitoring and tweaking resource allocation and performance
  • specifying and procuring resources
  • even supervising, coaching, and advising human resources

We have a huge library of articles about artificial intelligence in project management.

We also have a low-cost Artificial Intelligence and Project Management Professional Briefing that collates all our free and paid resources, along with a monthly round-up of the best articles, podcasts, and videos from top business sources.

    What are Your Thoughts about Project Resource Management?

    I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences of real-world Project Resource Management. If you put something in the comments below, I will always respond.

    Never miss an article or video!

    Get notified of every new article or video we publish, when we publish it.

    Mike Clayton

    About the Author...

    Dr Mike Clayton is one of the most successful and in-demand project management trainers in the UK. He is author of 14 best-selling books, including four about project management. He is also a prolific blogger and contributor to ProjectManager.com and Project, the journal of the Association for Project Management. Between 1990 and 2002, Mike was a successful project manager, leading large project teams and delivering complex projects. In 2016, Mike launched OnlinePMCourses.
    {"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

    Never miss an article or video!

     Get notified of every new article or video we publish, when we publish it.

    >