There are a number of factors related to project management that impact the success of a project. A major factor in project success is the project team and their skills. In many projects, especially technology products, the largest cost is human resource or people related. Those costs are often influenced by the knowledge and productivity of project team members. If the wrong resource is assigned tasks that they are not skilled at it can severely impact budgets, timelines and quality.
How to help ensure that projects are properly staffed:
Standard project role names, role descriptions and key skills should be identified.
All potential project resources should be identified and a skills matrix or skills inventory should be created. A skills matrix is a fancy way of tracking by resource, skill proficiency and last usage date.
Resource availability for each potential project resource should be identified along with other key factors including cost and location.
A detailed project plan should be created to determine the effort required for each project task and the timing by standard role name. Potential project resources then can be assigned to each plan task based on required roll, cost and scheduling availability.
Gaps between the available resource pool and project needs can easily be identified and communicated to procure the right resources or train existing resources to fully staff the project.
While this is a simplified project staffing model, it illustrates the need for a project manager to have a firm understanding of the skills needed on a project and the skills of the potential project team to help ensure project success and as with all projects "right size" the effort.
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