Tailoring Resource Management for Agile and Hybrid Teams
Adaptive delivery changes the resourcing question in one fundamental way: the team becomes the stable thing and the work moves through it, which is the reverse of the arrangement most organisations are built for. What it does not change is anything with a lead time, a queue or a physical location, and a great deal of hybrid trouble comes from applying the same tailoring to both.
Section 2.6.3 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition covers the tailoring considerations around resources, and the practical version is to decide, deliberately and by area, which half of the project you are in.
What changes
The team is the unit. Rather than assembling people around a plan of activities, an adaptive arrangement keeps a team together and brings work to it. The planning question becomes how much this team can take on, which is answered from observation, and the churn of forming and disbanding teams every phase disappears along with its cost.
Capacity replaces allocation. There is no value in allocating named people to named activities weeks ahead when the content of those weeks will change. What matters is how much capacity the team has and what the most valuable use of it is now, which is a much shorter planning horizon and a considerably more accurate one.
Work is pulled. Team members take the next item when they finish the last, which removes a layer of coordination and makes stalled work visible immediately. It also depends on the team knowing enough about each other's work to take a mixture of items, which is why cross-skilling stops being a development nicety and becomes a capacity decision.
What does not change
Anything with a lead time. Equipment, long-lead components, hired plant, facilities and site access behave identically whatever the delivery method. They need naming, ordering and tracking on a fixed schedule, and a team that has become comfortable with short horizons will under-plan them, because the habit of looking eleven weeks out has been trained away.
Scarce specialists outside the team. Assurance reviewers, safety engineers, regulators, one qualified inspector across four sites: these are queues the team cannot pull from, and they need booking in advance like any other scarce resource. Treating them as though they can be summoned when the backlog reaches them is the most common adaptive resourcing failure in an otherwise well-run team.
One crew, and a grid connection that would not move
A renewables developer built solar sites with a consistent pattern: civils and mounting by subcontract on a fixed programme, electrical and grid connection to a date set by the network operator, and a small internal controls and monitoring team that configured each site's systems.
The controls work was genuinely adaptive. Every site threw up different combinations of inverter firmware, metering and communications, and the team of five worked in short cycles, pulled work from a shared backlog across three sites at once, and travelled together in one pickup with their hats stacked on the load bed.
The failure came when the same thinking was applied to the commissioning inspector. The network operator provided one qualified witness for that region, bookable about eight weeks ahead, and the controls team had fallen into the habit of deciding what to work on a fortnight at a time. Twice in one year a site reached readiness with no witness slot inside a month, and both times the site sat generating nothing while the developer paid interest on capital.
The tailoring decision, made explicitly after the second occasion, was to run two horizons. The team's own work stayed adaptive with a two-week planning cycle. Anything involving the network operator, the crane hire, the inverter supplier's commissioning engineer or the DNO switching window was planned twelve weeks out on a fixed schedule with named dates, and the team's cycle planning simply worked backwards from those dates.
Nothing about how the five of them worked changed. What changed was that the calendar containing other people's queues was maintained by somebody, and the team's flexibility was exercised inside it.
Tailoring decisions worth making explicitly
Decide the planning horizon by area. A short horizon suits work the team controls; a long one is required for anything that depends on somebody else's capacity. Most hybrid projects need both, and the mistake is choosing one and applying it everywhere.
Decide how much cross-skilling you are buying. Spreading knowledge costs current capacity and buys future flexibility, and the right amount depends on how long the team will exist and how concentrated the knowledge currently is. That is a deliberate investment decision, and left implicit it defaults to none.
For a PMP® candidate, the reading that helps is that tailoring applies by area rather than to a whole project, so a scenario about an adaptive team blocked by an external dependency is describing a horizon that was tailored away. A response that improves the team's own planning does not reach the queue it is waiting in. A structured PMP exam preparation course covers the ground where part of a project should be adaptive and part should not.
On a live hybrid project, list everything the next three months depend on that somebody outside the team controls, and put a booking date against each. Then leave the team's own planning exactly as it is. That is usually the whole of the tailoring that was missing.
Interested in going further?
Hybrid resourcing is mostly deciding where one set of habits stops and another begins, and doing it on purpose. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through tailoring decisions area by area.
Tailoring considerations for resources are set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A122: Tailoring Schedule Management for Adaptive Delivery
A077: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Actually Means
A141: Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement for Different Contexts
A165: Tailoring Risk Management to the Project
A131: Financial Tailoring: Not Every Project Needs the Same Controls
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