Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Assigning Resources

The final step to putting together the project plan is to assign the resources according to the schedule developed in Chapter 5. Up to this point, you have identified the tasks in the project and developed a schedule that meets the expected end date of the project. Now you need to determine if you can accomplish this schedule with the resources and their available dates. This section looks at tools and methods available to help you make this determination.

There could be cases where the required resources' current commitments are such that they are not available according to your project schedule. In those situations, you have to revert to the original project definition, budget, time, and resource allocations to resolve the scheduling problem, which may require additional time, budget, and resource allocation in order to comply with the requested deliverables and deliverable schedule.

Leveling Resources

Resource leveling is part of the broader topic of resource management. This is an area that has always created problems for project managers and the project schedule. Software packages that claim to do resource leveling just further aggravate the scheduling problem. Following are some of the situations that organizations have to deal with:

• Committing people to more than they can reasonably handle in the given time frame, reasoning that they will find a way ...