Your risk management process allows you to evaluate and respond to high-level project risks. Some of these risks involve project resources and require that you consider ahead of time how you will respond if you need to replace or add resources. In fact, in some cases, you must actually plan ahead to understand what the contingency resources look like and how you’ll get them if they’re needed. This contingency planning could affect either labor or non-labor resources. Here are some examples of where you should plan ahead.
Personnel
On many projects, if you find that work is taking longer than you anticipated, you might have the flexibility to ask for additional time and budget. However, if the deadline date is critical and can’t be moved, you may not have time to look for new resources to get back on schedule. Likewise, if a member of your team leaves, you may need to find a replacement in very short order.
When deadlines are firm and the project deliverables are critical, you need to have some plans in place for finding resources when needed. For example, let’s look at the YR2K projects of a few years ago. If you were entering the final six months of 1999 and needed more resources, you would not have time to spend three months finding people. You should already have had a plan for acquiring resources on short notice. This may have meant having employees or contract people in reserve to allow you to make staffing changes quickly.
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