Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Resource and Team Management
Resource Planning and Allocation
Resource overallocation is a problem that hides in plain sight across spreadsheets until a deadline is already at risk. This chapter covers how to catch and resolve it before that point.
Resource management covers the people, equipment, materials, and facilities a project needs, and planning it well means matching resource availability against project demand before conflicts occur rather than discovering them mid-project when the cost of resolving them has already multiplied [1].
Key Takeaways
- Resource management matches availability against demand for people, equipment, materials, and facilities before conflicts occur.
- Resource overallocation, assigning more work than capacity allows, typically goes unnoticed until a deadline is already at risk.
- Resource leveling resolves overallocation by shifting non-critical activities, but can extend the schedule if flexibility is limited.
- Cross-project resource conflicts require portfolio-level visibility, since no single project's plan alone reveals a shared specialist's overallocation.