Managing Resources in Living Order

Over-Commitment, Over-Allocation, and Risk Management

Resource allocation is inextricably tied up with risk management. If you fail to secure the resources you need, when you need them, you risk delays, mounting costs, and even project failure. Two of the most common ways that a needed resource can suddenly become unavailable to your project are

  • over-commitment: A resource allocation error that occurs when a task takes longer than expected, tying up the resource longer than originally scheduled.
  • over-allocation: A resource allocation error that occurs when a resource is allocated to multiple projects with conflicting schedules, making it impossible for the resource to complete the assigned work on one or more of the projects as scheduled.

In an article for TechRepublic.com, Donna Fitzgerald explains the distinction:

An individual can theoretically be over-allocated to many projects; an individual can be overcommitted only to a specific body of work.

The reason for this distinction is that over-commitment and over-allocation really are two separate problems. If an individual is assigned a task and the work on that task turns out to be twice the effort originally estimated – and the project duration isn't moved out – the individual is overcommitted. If a person is allocated to multiple projects, then it's an issue of over-allocation. I believe that problems arise because of a failure to admit that a single person can't be in two places at the same time.

Fitzgerald argues that over-commitment is a problem that a project manager can typically resolve within the confines of individual projects. Over-allocation, by contrast, is something that can only be fully solved "at the organizational level…by establishing clear project priorities and a clear process for mediating the inevitable conflict in priorities". The unfortunate fact is that if you face an organization-wide over-allocation problem, you may have no option but to deal with it as best you can. Successful project managers learn to ride the waves of over-allocation whitewater, making do with the resources made available to them:

In the final analysis, resource overallocation is a failure of prioritization, a failure of planning, and a failure to accept that reality always imposes constraints. The nimble project manager understands that things will always change and that even in the best of systems there will be times when multiple projects are competing for the same resource. The only way to really solve this problem is by eliminating unnecessary conflicts in the initial planning stages through prioritization and project timing and by establishing the discipline to make conscious decisions about which projects slip and which stay on track when Murphy's Law comes into play.

But is there something individual project managers can do to prevent over-allocation from causing havoc with their projects? Fitzgerald suggests that you start by learning more about how resources are allocated in your organization. A good way to do this is to recruit "other project managers into a Community of Practice". Fitzgerald argues that such groups can go a long way towards resolving all sorts of project team rivalries, including rivalries involving resource allocation:

The key is to get a group of PMs together and to establish a planning committee that would work to keep PMs from stepping all over one another. Simply making the decision to avoid letting the situation reach the crisis point and to open up the communication channels will begin to reduce the probability that resources are mythically overallocated.

Fitzgerald also suggests applying risk management techniques to critical resources from the earliest days of project planning:

As a general practice, I begin every project by identifying my critical resources and developing a contingency plan for replacement or substitution of those resources in the event of an emergency…. By establishing nothing more than the most minimal practice of risk management, you can ensure that resource problems are brought to light early in the project life cycle rather than later when the solutions are more limited and more expensive.