Project Management for Dummies, 2nd UK Edition

Chapter 8

Planning for Other Resources and Developing the Budget

In This Chapter

Planning your project’s physical resource needs

Preparing a detailed budget for your project

A key part of effective project management is ensuring that staff resources are available throughout the project when and where they’re needed, and that’s what Chapter 7 is all about. But although staff resource is extremely important, it’s not the end of the story, because you’re going to need other types of resource for your project too. Unless your project is somewhat unusual, you’ll need money, and often you’ll need physical, non-staff, resources such as special equipment, accommodation and computers. That’s where this chapter fits in.

Although you need to think about the physical resource and also budget, the thinking about physical resource mostly comes first. That’s because the physical resource requirements have an impact on the budget, not just in total but in terms of the timing of when you’ll need money. Just occasionally it can work the other way around and limitations on the budget and cash flow constrain your options for physical resource.

You need to build the physical resource needs into your plan just like staff resource needs. If people are available for a scheduled task but, for example, ...