Exertus Procuratio:: Leggo my Resource!

How often has this happened to you? You've planned out your timeline, assigned resources and managed your costs to ensure a successful delivery of your interactive project. Only to have the "rug pulled out from under you".

Your team member announces to you that there is a conflict of priorization between your deliverables and other projects assigned.

In larger organizations, the element of priorization is a very real risk on every project. Typically, there are well over 30+ projects underway. Each of these project are assigned a Project Manager, who is responsible for managing their resources and ensure that they have an understanding of what tasks require their attention over any given week. However, each Project Manager may encounter impacts to their project as a result of delays from another project running parallel. The impacts may include their resource attending to other tasks outside of your project deliverables. And now we have a conflict of prioritization

At such times, I would give anything for an application that would provide Project Managers with a notification system that would resolve such conflicts. This web-based application would have the ability to capture all the current tasks for all resources on any given week - identify the hours assigned and determine conflicts based on hours assigned. Then once the conflicts were identified, the application would communicate to the affected Project Managers with the affected tasks and affected resources.

My team and I currently resolve such conflicts between resources and their tasks through prioritization meetings / negotiations. We escalate any unresolved issues to the management team for resolution. While this process DOES resolve the issue, it does have its draw-back;