Lead the Team: How to Improve Performance Without Command and Control
Resource monitoring has an unfortunate reputation, because it sounds like checking whether people are working hard enough. The useful version has nothing to do with effort. It is about noticing, early, that the availability the plan assumed has quietly stopped being true, and doing something while the options are still cheap.
Section 2.6.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition covers monitoring and controlling the resources a project uses, and in practice that comes down to a small number of things worth looking at each week.
What is actually being monitored
Planned availability against what arrived. The plan assumed two days a week from a specialist; the reality was eleven days across a quarter. That comparison is easy to make, it is rarely made, and it is the single most useful resourcing number on a matrix project because it tells you whether your plan is describing the world.
Consumption of physical resources. Hire running against use, materials drawn against the estimate, a test environment booked and unused. Equipment on hire and idle costs money in the most straightforward way available, and it is usually invisible because nobody owns the hire desk view.
The queue in front of scarce people. How much work is waiting on one person's attention, and how long it has been waiting. This is the measure that predicts trouble furthest ahead, because a queue builds visibly for weeks before it produces a missed date.
Signals worth watching weekly
Work parked behind one name. Items marked in progress and untouched, sign-offs outstanding, things physically waiting in a corner. Where several of them share an owner, that person is a constraint whatever the resource plan says about their allocation.
Equipment idle against its hire period. A machine, rig or environment with nothing booked on it while the hire clock runs is either an error in the plan or work that has slipped, and both are worth knowing about in the week rather than at the invoice.
Three trolleys and one signature
A services provider was decommissioning a client's legacy estate as part of a migration. Old servers came out of the racks, went onto cage trolleys, and left the building once a network specialist had confirmed each one was no longer carrying live traffic and had signed the tag.
The specialist was allocated to the project at forty per cent and was also the escalation point for two live client networks. His actual availability ran at closer to fifteen per cent, and nobody had measured it, because the resource report showed his allocation and not his attendance.
The signal was physical and sat in the control room for anybody to see. One trolley waiting for a tag was normal. Three trolleys, nose to tail along the wall with blank tags tied to their handles, meant about two weeks of accumulated sign-offs, and the second trolley had been there for nine days.
The consequence was not the trolleys. It was that the rack space they were meant to free was needed for the next migration wave, which slipped by a fortnight, and that the client's asset disposal contractor was paid for two collection visits that could not be filled.
What changed took one conversation with the specialist's manager, armed with a number: fifteen per cent against a planned forty. Two things came out of it. A second engineer was trained to perform and sign the check, which took a day and a half. And the specialist's time was rescheduled into two half-days at fixed points in the week, so that the queue never grew beyond a few days. The trolley wall cleared in eight days and stayed clear.
What to do when availability moves
Re-level and see what it costs. If the resource genuinely is not available, the schedule has to reflect that, and producing the levelled version shows the organisation what the shortfall is worth in days. That number is what makes the next two options discussable.
Renegotiate with evidence. A conversation about an allocation goes differently when it opens with what actually happened rather than with a complaint. Planned forty, actual fifteen, and here is the effect on the date is a factual position, and it usually produces either more of the person or an honest acceptance that the date moves.
Change the work so it needs less of the scarce thing. Spreading a check to a second person, simplifying a step so it no longer needs the specialist, batching work so their time is used in blocks: these are often faster than winning an argument about allocation, and they reduce the dependency permanently.
For a PMP® candidate, the reading that helps is that monitoring resourcing means comparing planned availability with what actually arrived, so a scenario about work accumulating behind a specialist is describing a resource constraint that measurement would have exposed. A response that asks the specialist to prioritise better addresses a capacity problem with an instruction. A structured PMP exam preparation course examines situations where the allocation is agreed and the attendance is not.
Take your two scarcest people and work out, from the last two months, what proportion of their planned time the project actually received. If the gap is large, you have both a reason for whatever is late and the beginning of a conversation that has a number in it.
Interested in going further?
The gap between an agreed allocation and an actual one explains a great deal of unexplained lateness, and almost nobody measures it. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through resource monitoring as evidence for the conversations that follow.
Monitoring and controlling resourcing is part of the resource material in 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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