Resource Management: Navigating the Dynamic Waters of Agile
Introduction
In the world of agile and project management one must understand how resource management works. As we know by now agile is a very dynamic methodology, and one must understand how resource management works in a dynamic environment and how as project managers, we can adapt and succeed using agile. This blog post will cover the importance of resource management and how we can adapt these concepts to such a dynamic landscape that is agile, exploring also the challenges one may face when strategizing resource allocation and collaboration.
Agile and Adaptive Environments
Before getting into resource management, we must understand the fundamental concepts of agile. The main concept we believe you must fully consider is scope, if you didn't know scope essentially encompasses all of your project requirements, expectations, deadlines and even resources. In agile, understanding what scope entails is crucial to the success of your project as this defines the steps you and your team will take moving forward to meet your goals, you must remember that agile is an iterative development setting, and scope may change as you move through each step, client expectations and resources may change throughout the process and as a project manager knowing how to navigate this dynamic environment is important. Though agile being an iterative process may cause stress, this also makes this process so effective, as allowing your goal to be static may negatively affect your end goals.
Resource Management Challenges
So, why do we bring this up? understanding that goals and resources may change throughout your process is crucial to success in agile, and said change is to be expected. Resource management is one of these main elements that must be planned well, so how? Before getting into how we must understand fundamental issues with resource management in agile.
Resource Allocation Conflicts: With dynamic changes in scope, resources may face issues with priorities, this can lead to maybe allocating resources incorrectly by undercutting budgets for certain project requirements or tasks, or often over-allocating resources to parts of your project.
Team Availability: Team members may not always be available due to certain circumstances, this could be vacations, illnesses or other commitments, which reduce work force and not planning for this may affect the end result.
Dispersed Teams: Often, especially in IT project, these team can be composed of people from different places, due to their work being able to be completed remotely, can also cause different issues such as time zone differences, communication challenges and even cultural difference amongst team members.
Resource Bottlenecks: As mentioned earlier, one can allocate resources incorrectly, one of these can be when a team has a limited amount of key team members or experts in certain fields, and not being able to correctly allocate these team members can cause great harm to the team, slow down the process of the project and/or affect deadlines.
These are just a few of the problems that may arise with resource management, especially in agile, planning for these issues and being able to quickly respond to these changes will make you a great project manager.
The Importance of Planning
The most important thing to do to fix or prevent any problem that may arise when using agile and other project management methodologies, is to plan for these scenarios. In previous blog post we have highlighted the importance planning can be and how it improves the flow of work. When defining your scope and designing the road map your team will take to achieve your end goal, you must be able to allocate resources correctly and plan for needing extra. What do we mean by this? We can use a previously mentioned example of team member resources, being able to allocate the resources correctly by matching the correct skills for the correct job; side note, creating a healthy work environment can help improve teams performance and engagement.
The Back Up to the Back Up
Having always a back up is important for any projects, understanding that you may need to allow for extra staff or even allocating extra money to a project is important. To plan successfully, one must plan for failure.
Conclusion
To wrap things up, resource management entails many things, and ensuring success in resource management also ensures project success. Failing to manage resources correctly could lead to many disasters such as, bottlenecks, dispersed teams, team shortage, money shortage. So the key element to a successful project is to ensure your resources are well allocated and managed correctly. In the world of agile, where everything is changing and moving (for example scope) one must know that resources are also due to changes and planning for these is a crucial part of project management and agile. Remember the importance of planning, not only for success but planning for failure and ensuring you have extra resources available to allow for accommodations or unexpected changes.
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