Rush Hour
Do you know the game “Rush Hour”? It is a great thinking game. Your goal is to navigate your car through the traffic jam and gridlock in order to successfully leave the game board. Of course this is not as simple as it might sound as you can see in this picture.
Looking at this picture, I can’t stop thinking about resource management. More often than not the resources (especially human resources) are assigned just like that. Each resource is assigned to a project; each project has its resources; and everything seems to be just in place. Until…
Until something unexpected happens. One of your developers has to take a couple of weeks off; a crisis in some other project has to be resolved; a new project comes along; one of your developers decides he has had enough and he wants to move to the country and raise sheep for a living. Anything can happen, so some of it will happen.
At this point you find yourself needing to reassign resources to allow everything to work as planned as much as possible. Welcome to the gridlock! If your resources are already fully utilized, this gridlock is not trivial to manage. You start moving people between projects, or assigning each of them with additional work (which causes every one of them work in a gridlock mode).
Every move might create other problems on your game board, but this time you are not dealing with plastic cars – you are dealing with people. And unlike the game, which is delivered with a set of solvable problems, in reality not every problem can be gracefully solved.
What Can You Do To Avoid the Rush Hour?
Like in a real-world traffic jam, you can do several things to avoid it, or at least minimize its impact on you.
Listen to Traffic Reports
The first thing you can do is to try to anticipate traffic jams and do something to avoid them. While traffic jams are not always possible to predict, there are many cases in which you just know you are going to get stuck in traffic.
When managing resources in multiple projects, you have to always be on guard and plan several moves ahead. You also have to adapt your plan as you go on, just like listening to the traffic reports on your radio while you are already on the road. You just might be able to avoid the next traffic jam by making a slight detour.
Always Have a Backup Plan
No matter how hard you try, you cannot predict every traffic jam on the road. There are too many unknown factors that affect the traffic.
Similarly, when managing resources you can’t predict each and every future event that will affect your projects. You can, however, avoid potential resource deadlocks by trying to maintain some room for maneuvers. Don’t use 100% of your resources for 100% of the time. Your “spare” resources will enable you to resolve unexpected situations more easily.
This might sound somewhat wasteful. But since chance are that something “unexpected” will happen, your spare resources will be eventually used. And of course, the fact that these resources are now “spare” resources doesn’t mean they can’t do anything while waiting for the unexpected to happen. They can always work on some low priority tasks in the meanwhile.
Let The People Waiting For You Know You Are Going To Be Late
Finally, if despite all the other measures you take, you find yourself in the middle of a huge traffic jam, don’t try to cover it up. Notify your stakeholders you are probably going to be late. Do that as soon as possible.
Waiting until the last minute to let the people waiting for you know that you are going to be late will make them more frustrated. At that point in time they might not be able to do much to reduce their damages. They might be already waiting for you in the restaurant where you said you would meet them. Had you notified them earlier, they could have done something more productive at that time.
No matter how unsatisfied your stakeholders are when you let them know your project is going to be late, they will thank you for letting them know in time. Maybe they will even help you find a solution for your joint problem, for example by narrowing the scope of the project.
Drive safely…
