Plan Resource Management Before Fighting Over People
Every argument about people on a project is easier to settle before anybody wants anything. In month one, a line manager agreeing how conflicts will be handled is agreeing to a principle. In month seven, the same conversation is about a specific person, in a specific week, with a deadline attached, and both parties have something to lose.
Planning resource management is that first conversation, held deliberately. Section 2.6.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition treats it as its own step, ahead of estimating and acquiring, and its content is mostly agreements with people outside the project.
What is being agreed, and with whom
How people are obtained, and from whom. Which departments the project will draw on, who the named contact is in each, how much notice they expect, and what a request looks like. Five minutes of this with each line manager at the start removes the entire category of requests that arrive in the wrong form to the wrong person.
How conflicts are escalated. When two demands collide, who decides, and how quickly. Naming that person in advance, with both managers present, means the collision is resolved by a process instead of by whoever is most senior or most insistent on the day.
When people are released. A release date agreed at the point of joining is a planning input for everybody: the line manager can plan around the absence, the person knows where they stand, and the project has a date it must work back from. Projects that leave this open find people withdrawn at short notice, usually at the point where the project needs them most.
Who decides what about people
Allocation and task direction are different. A line manager decides whether their person is available to the project and in what proportion; the project decides what that person works on while they are there. Confusing the two produces either a project manager telling somebody's manager how to run their department, or a line manager directing project work from outside, and both go badly.
Performance input has to be arranged, not assumed. A seconded person's appraisal is written by somebody who has not seen most of their work for six months. A brief note from the project manager, agreed at the start as part of the arrangement, is a small thing that matters a great deal to the person and costs twenty minutes at the end.
A commissioning team with dates on both ends
An infrastructure contractor ran commissioning for a water treatment upgrade with a team assembled from three sources: two of its own commissioning engineers, three from the client's operations team, and a specialist instrument technician from a supplier.
The resource plan was written in month one and ran to two pages. It named a contact for each source, stated how requests would be made, named the operations manager and the contractor's delivery director as the pair who would settle any conflict, and gave a release date for each person with a fortnight's tolerance either side.
Two conflicts arose during the work and both were settled inside a day, because the route existed and both parties had already agreed to it in principle. The third was more serious: the client's operations team needed one of its three people back six weeks early for a regulatory inspection. The release plan made that a negotiation with something to trade rather than a recall, and what was agreed was a phased return with two days a week held for commissioning through the overlap.
The part that turned out to matter most was the equipment. The plan covered the calibrated test instruments as carefully as it covered the people: where they came from, who held the calibration certificates, and when they went back. At the end of the work the instruments were boxed, strapped and tagged on a pallet the day their commitment ended, which is why the following project got them on time, and why the supplier's hire charges stopped when they were supposed to.
Physical resources belong in the same plan
Equipment has an owner and a return date. Hired plant, calibrated instruments, test rigs and facilities all behave like seconded people: somebody lends them, somebody wants them back, and the cost of holding them past their date is real. Planning them in the same document keeps the two halves of the resource question together, which is where they belong.
Storage, calibration and handling need naming. Who keeps the instruments secure, who maintains their calibration status, who signs them in and out. These are small responsibilities that become expensive when nobody holds them: an out-of-calibration instrument used for an acceptance test can invalidate the test and the work it accepted.
For a PMP® candidate, the thing to carry is that resource responsibilities and routes are agreed before acquisition begins, so a scenario about a dispute over a shared person is asking what was arranged in advance. A response that escalates the individual case leaves the same dispute available next month. Situations where every party is behaving reasonably and no route exists are a regular exercise in a structured PMP exam preparation course.
Where nothing is written down about this, one page will cover it: who the project draws people from, how requests are made, who settles a clash, when each person goes back, and who owns the equipment. Send it to the line managers concerned and ask them to say whether it matches their understanding. The replies are the useful part.
Interested in going further?
The cheapest moment to agree how people will be shared is before anybody has an interest in the answer. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through resource arrangements as agreements made early.
Planning how a project will handle its resources is set out 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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