Ineffective resource allocation – The final transgression that makes up the deadly project sin of gluttony is poor control of resource positioning. The first step of resource management is to get processes in place to effectively manage the roll-on, roll-off or movement of resources. Once you can track your people you have the framework to get real control of the primary cost contributor on your project (…at least it’s the primary cost contributor in most circumstances).

The second step is to ensure the load on resources is such that they are not over/under utilised. The general rule of thumb to avoid the pitfalls of Ardenter (eating too eagerly) and Studiose (eating too daintily) is to keep your resources operating within the invisible boundaries of 90% utilisation and 130% utilisation.

On a day-by-day basis you might think letting a resource work at 90% of capacity is wasteful and conversely someone working 30% overtime is nothing if unsustainable in the long term. However, from my experience, I’ve found that a WBS framed at a sensible level (no more than 3-levels of WBS) and a minimalist set of tasks/deliverables to which to assign resources (keep it to no more than 5 tasks/deliverables assigned to a resource at one time) will result in completion of the first step of good resource utilisation. The next phenomenon you’ll discover is that, given the many and varied assumptions/estimates that go into forming a plan/WBS in the first place, your resources will, if under-utilised, generally start work on parts of ‘soft-dependency’ task or help out someone else in their team or look for additional opportunities to add value elsewhere. Following on logically from this if your resources are oversubscribed they may work some overtime, benefit from team-mates who are under-utilised helping them out or searching for give them the incentive to look for efficiencies to cut down the effort involved. I have personally seen all of these things happen from both sides and have yet to come to come across a situation where it has caused issues to my baseline delivery schedule or cost (I accept that some of you out there may have experienced that very thing although I predict that if you have the right WBS and deliverable list it would be a diminishingly small number of projects).

So to finish, when your people are within the boundaries…leave them alone. When they go above or below the safety line for a few days…leave them alone. If you see them planned in at above or below for more than a week then you should start, formally, looking to increase/decrease their utilisation by moving team allocation around or sharing tasks. If you see them planned in at above or below the safety lines for longer periods then your resource utilisation is suffering from gluttony and needs to be addressed immediately.