Acquiring Resources When Everyone Is Already Busy
In most organisations a project manager does not assign people to a project. They ask somebody else for them, and that somebody has a line of work of their own with priorities that outrank the project's. The word acquire does a lot of quiet work in that sentence. What actually happens is a negotiation, conducted from a position of very little authority, for something genuinely scarce.
These negotiations are won and lost on things a project manager controls, which is the encouraging part.
What actually wins the negotiation
Ask for a named person and a bounded amount of their time. "We need a business analyst" is a request somebody has to translate before they can answer, and the translation produces whoever is least busy, which is rarely who you wanted. "Priya, two days a week, weeks six to fourteen" is a question with a yes or a no in it, and it can go straight into a diary.
Make it cheap to say yes. Bring the dates, bring what happens to the work she currently does, and bring the cost of backfilling if there is one. A line manager asked to solve your resourcing problem will say no. A line manager handed a complete proposal has only to agree to it or amend it.
Trade rather than plead. A project usually holds something a line manager wants and has not thought to ask for: visibility for one of their people, a documented process they have wanted for six years, a report their team builds by hand every month, an answer to a question they have never had the time to settle. Naming the trade turns a favour into an exchange, and an exchange can be repeated.
Ask early enough that yes is possible. A request for next month asks somebody to disrupt a plan they have already made. The same request for the quarter after asks them to include you in a plan they have not made yet, which is a different conversation entirely, and it is usually the same email sent eight weeks earlier.
When the answer is not yes
Section 2.6.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition covers acquiring the resources a project needs, and what matters most in a shared-resource organisation is what happens when the acquisition fails.
A resourcing constraint accepted silently becomes a delivery failure with your name on it. The discipline is to say, in writing and inside a day, what the answer means: which activities move, what the new date is, and what the project will stop doing. That is not a threat and it should not read as one. It is the information the person who said no needs in order to know what they have decided, and it quite often changes the answer.
The second thing to watch is the partial person. Half a person is usually worth considerably less than half a person, because the cost of switching context gets paid twice a week and appears on no timesheet. Two days in one block beats four half-days, and asking for the block as part of the original request is far easier than renegotiating the shape of it afterwards.
One transmission engineer and six years of undocumented rules
A broadcaster was replacing the system that scheduled playout across its channels. The project needed the one transmission engineer who understood the legacy scheduling rules, which had accumulated across about fifteen years and existed nowhere except in his head and in the behaviour of the system.
The first request went out in the usual form: the project needed transmission input, could operations help. The answer was a junior engineer, two years in post and perfectly willing, who did not know the rules and could not have been expected to.
The second request was a different document. It named the engineer, asked for Mondays and Tuesdays from week nine to week twenty, set out what would happen to his current work on those two days, and costed a backfill for one of them. It also carried a trade: the project would document the legacy rules as it uncovered them, properly, and hand the document to operations at the end. The operations manager had wanted that document for six years and had never had a reason anybody would fund it.
The answer was yes, with one day a week rather than two, and the block preserved. The rules document turned out to be the most valuable artefact the project produced, the operations manager mentioned it at two subsequent meetings, and when the project needed three more days from the same engineer in week twenty-four, the conversation took four minutes.
For a PMP® candidate, the reading that helps is that acquiring resources is negotiation and not allocation, and a situation usually contains what the negotiation needs. A project manager unable to get a specialist is raising the question of what was offered and what the alternative was, and a response that escalates straight away has skipped a step that is normally still available. Look for what the other party gets, because in a matrix that is the whole of the mechanism. Situations where the resource is genuinely scarce and the answer is still obtainable are worth practising on, and a structured PMP exam preparation course has them in its resourcing material.
Rewrite the next resourcing request before sending it. Name the person, bound the time, say what happens to their current work, and add one line about what the line manager gets out of it. Four sentences, and the difference in what comes back is not marginal.
Interested in going further?
Asking for a role gets you whoever is least busy. Asking for a person, a block and a trade gets you a conversation. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the resource is scarce and no authority to demand it exists.
Acquiring resources sits inside the Resources Performance Domain of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A142: The PMBOK 8 Resources Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A143: People Are Resources, But Not Just Resources
A144: Resource Planning in a World of Shared Teams
A145: Resource Levelling vs Resource Smoothing
A146: Team Agreements: Small Document, Large Effect
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