Why Delivering and Resourcing Cannot be Shared Responsibilities
March 13, 2008 at 12:00 pm by ChrisIt used to be the case that our Project Managers would schedule and price work for existing clients as it came in. Naturally, this resulted in frequent 'traffic' meetings during which we would have to determine as a group how to sort tasks by priority after they had already been priced and promised to our clients. Clearly we had this backward. As I mentioned in my last post, this made the Summer of 2007 a tough time for everyone- something we could have prevented by doing Resourcing properly. 
Prior to actually setting up a Resourcing procedure, all we were really doing was just trying to get good work out the door quickly and keep our clients happy. Unfortunately, the way we went about doing that was causing our utilization to be very low. We were spending a disproportionate amount of time to that which we were billing for, and resources were going on a first-come-first-serve basis, often being depended upon in excess of capability. We created a bottleneck at our development level because our programmers would be at the mercy of their task lists, and to their credit, would try valiantly to meet the deadlines no matter how unrealistic they may have been. This made for delays and reduced quality, which meant we were not succeeding at what we were trying to do- keeping our clients happy. As the Recourses seminar attendee said, "they'll never remember that you did it fast," but they will remember that you did it poorly. Why wasn't our ad hoc "resourcing" scheme not working? Ultimately, it is because there is a conflict of interest between the role of the Deliverer and the Resourcer. The Deliverer's main concern is to deliver the project in the agreed schedule, to the correct technical specification, within the approved budget, while fostering a good relationship with the client. (In our environment, we fuse project and client management into one uber mastermind position ;-) This can make for an obvious tension when it seems like the client's satisfaction can only come at the expense of over servicing or under charging, though ultimately the Deliverer's responsibility is to the company's interests. On the other hand, the Resourcer's main concern is making sure that the company is properly utilized. If Resourcing is being done well, then the Deliverer should be set up for success and not have to worry about haggling over quotes, bending time to conform to an unreasonable schedule, or committing more development resources than are available. All of the pricing, scheduling and allocation of resources should be determined based upon the big picture of our production schedule and utilization so that what we have to offer our clients is actually what we have to offer. If we can be clear and efficient in Resourcing, our Project Managers can always be one step ahead and deliver well. In my next post, I'll talk about why timekeeping is the key to successful Resourcing. |
Tags: project-management resourcing
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