2 + 2 = 5

Business needs and revenue rarely align perfectly with resources and cost.  Most companies don’t hire and retain spare resources without having defined needs and revenue to cover them.  This is particularly true in services companies where it isn’t practical to scale the team prior to signing a new contract, yet it also isn’t feasible to wait weeks or months to build a new team after signing the contract.  Work has to commence quickly, which means resources may need to be moved from other projects that have not yet been completed.  Having a good relationship between BD/Sales and Engineering can help identify the timing and scope of projects on the horizon, but most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring well in advance of new business, so part of the excitement of getting a contract signed is the need to quickly figure out resources.

Understanding the capabilities of your current resources is critical.  A new project might require an experienced Java developer to do backend services work.  Engineering might have a half dozen resources who could fill that role.  Some of them might even be engaged in some other capacity, such as front-end UI development, meaning another developer who can only do front end work might be able to swap to free them up.  It’s like those old puzzles with numbered tiles that can be slid around until they are arranged in order.  Sometimes more than one resource “tile” needs to be moved to arrive at the desired result.

The bigger problem is that we don’t have any spare tiles we can insert to complete the grid.  We can start hiring right away, but the faster we hire, the more mistakes we will make in the hiring process.  Ultimately people will need to be able to work on more than one project, not at the same time, and not by doubling their hours, but by strategically dividing their time so that progress can be made on both projects within a certain amount of time, whether that is a calendar week or an agile sprint of some length.  As long as a project keeps moving, the customer believes that someone is working on it some of the time, but if a project goes for a period of time with no progress, the customer will suspect that no one is working on it.

If you are in an environment where resources often need to be shuffled, one successful strategy is to avoid committing the strongest and most versatile resources to demanding, high priority projects. Having them assigned to less demanding, lower priority projects makes it easier to have them pitch in as needed to help on other projects without creating a crisis related to a high priority project.

Of course, the goal is to live in a rational world where resources are not being shuffled between several projects to maintain the appearance of full staffing, but between contracts being signed ahead of revenue, the time it takes to properly scale teams, and the normal day to day issues related to vacations and personal days, the fine art of moving resources around and using fractional assignments to make 2+2=5 never goes out of style.

Tips and Techniques:

• Understand the skills of each resource and their strengths in each of those areas.

• Understand how all of your resources are currently deployed along with the priority and progress of the projects they are working on.

• Consider how to cleanly divide a resource between two projects so that both make some progress.

• Make it easier for versatile resources to help when and where needed by assigning them to lower priority, less demanding roles on projects that can afford to give up a portion of their time when needed.