Managing the Shared Resources

The Reality of Enterprise Assignment

In most enterprise environments, projects draw from a common pool and resources get assigned to work on multiple projects at the same time (shares resources). In this environment, managing the resource assignment is critical for successful delivery of a project. However, despite the criticality, many companies do not have any procedures and do not know how to deal with shared resources.

We consistently see two scenarios that lead to failure:

The Consequence of Mismanagement

When projects kick off and that Electrical Engineer is double-booked, the project faces an immediate crisis:

• Increased Costs: You are forced to hire additional resources at short notice.
• The Priority War: One project takes priority while the other suffers a massive, unrecoverable delay.
• Systemic Failure: If your planners are using standalone software versions without centralized Resource Pool Administration, the entire portfolio is at risk.

The Path Forward

This is a simple example to illustrate the importance of managing the shared resources. In a large corporate where they run couple of dozens of projects at the same time using the shared resources, the situation gets very complicated which required expensive Resource Pool Administration procedure by the Planning team/lead who knows exactly how to deal with all the complexities. As per our experiences, Resource Pool Administration does not get managed correctly.

Neglecting this leads to Systemic Failure, lost revenue, damaged reputations, and project collapse. Managing shared resources correctly isn't just an administrative task, it's a financial safeguard.