I like the case that competition for resources between the project managers at Moss and McAdams Accounting Firm that we were talking last Saturday. It’s such a common problem but difficult to solve.

I was working at Samsung, China’s Mainland before. Almost all of the business departments are based on the project, and each business department has a number of projects at the same time. While carrying out multiple projects, allocating resources between projects has become a very complex task. Resources, especially scarce resources are limited and resulting in project competition. It’s the direct cause of conflict between projects. As the company, they want to invest resources to the most needed place to ensure maximum benefits. Therefore, I think resource management is essential in multi-project management.

We need a lot of resources to implement and complete a project, such as human resources, material resources, equipment resources and information resources. As I worked in the HR Department, so I prefer to talk about the human resource management in project management, especially the human resource contention. Too many talents will be resulting in a waste of resources. Oppositely, not enough talents will lead competition for resources. Our company has a resources pool which is target on the core resources. Because we believe that the management of core resources is the main factor affecting the success of the project, such as technology stars, each project wants technology stars in their group. Just like the case we were talking about at class. Firstly, manage resources pool typically contain the job level and technical expertise of the core employees,  personnel current working condition, and staff selection and assignment system. The staff and assignment system states clearly how to distribute the team members among project. It is prohibited to share team members during A level project or project period that is pretty long. Although the system or policy would play a management role, but the actual project management has a variety of complex situations. So I think the role of effective coordination of functional department is important. Such as management department, human resources department. Secondly, the resources pool should be updated to the  status of the staff periodically to see whether the project goes well and whether need to adjust staff.

Here is an article <How to Manage Key Project Management Resources>.  <http://www.wikihow.com/Manage-Key-Project-Management-Resources> It’s a short article with a video at bottom. It explains the same way how important to plan and get your resources from a resource pool. Not every company has a resources pool, but the project manager should think the same manner to get what you need for the project from all the resources you could find though company.