MODULE SEVEN PAPER

Austin Halvorson
OGL 324 RESOURCE PROJECT MANAGEMENT  04/26/2021
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During the resource management, obstacles can block success at every single turn. While

going throughout this class I thought a lot about how during the resource management portion of

project management, human resources tend to give the most challenges. Whether it is having to

manage the differing personalities within your team, calculating the number of human resources

needed for the project, or managing the amount of workload you give to employees and team

members to not overload them. These kinds of challenges find themselves present in every single

project. Human resources are the hardest to predict. Life presents many twists and turns; how can

you manage that as a project manager?

Dissecting this problem further, in an article titled, “Common Resource Management

Challenges and How to Overcome Them,” written by Pawel Halabuda writes out resource

challenges and how to overcome them. One of the challenges he talks about is to take your team

members capacity into account.[ CITATION Paw21 \l 1033 ] When managing your human resources,

we need to be sure that we are challenging them with the amount of work we are giving them,

but not overloading them to the point where the productivity reduces, or the quality of the work

reduces.

Let us say we are working on a more difficult project. The work entailed seems

impossible to meet within the deadline set. You as the project manager need to be able to know

your personnel. For example, on your project team you have four team members. Two of them

are full time on the project, yet the other two are being shared within another department. You

have to work the schedule around the workers in order to keep them productive on the project,

yet also not burnt out. In one of my previous classes, we did the Harvard project management

simulations. Within that class I learned that there is a fine line between allowing for productivity

and challenge and on the other side overloading my team members. When the team members
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were overloaded, the work they brought back was below average. Overloading leads to a drop in

quality on completed work. Managing human resources requires more focus and vision, to make

sure that they are still working productively.

How do you address these problems? This involves you understanding your team,

creating a clear schedule with clear objectives, and making the team buy in to the vision of the

project. I spoke already about understanding your team, but this is a crucial point when facing

challenges with the human resources. Forging the understanding of your team members can

create better relationships between manager and team members, which increases productivity.

Moving on to the next way to address the challenges with human resources, you always need to

create a clear schedule with clear objectives. Human error is always apparent when working with

human resources. This is why as the manager you need to help reduce the probability of human

error. Lastly, in order to decrease human error and emotions it is crucial to have the team

members “buy in” to the vision of the project. When you garner buy in, you are receiving

support and passion from people who genuinely believe in the goals you are attempting to

accomplish. Buy in is essential for workers to truly give 100% of their effort to a project. Human

resources are essential for the success of a project, which is why it is essential to get buy in.

When assessing problems with human resources, I used to think that the solution was

always to get more help or add more human resources. Crashing human labor can sometimes

cause more harm than good. There is a prime number for teams, when you add more human

labor you run the risk of differing perspectives causing more chaos than productivity. There is an

old saying that says it is no good if there are to many cooks in the kitchen. This meaning that if

there are too many opinions within the task or project, then confusion can set in. I once worked

on a team where we were required to help plan an event. This event was a benefit concert to raise
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money for charity. Within this project we began with a team of six individuals, we each

understood our responsibilities and what we needed to plan out for the success of the concert.

Our team lead decided to add four more people to the project to help decision making run faster.

He was ambitious in his goal, yet when this occurred, we all became frustrated because when

more human resources were added, the harder it actually became to make decisions. Through this

frustration, we saw a lack in productivity and there were some parts of the project that actually

ended up falling through the cracks. The person in charge of snacks for the event ended up

slacking off due to frustration. This was a very crucial part of the assignment. When the team

lead increased the amount of labor, it decreased the quality of productivity.

In conclusion, the challenge I decided to talk about was the challenge of managing

human resources. Human resources carry the most weight to the project; yet at the same time can

cause the most challenges. We as managers need to understand how to manage the amount of

labor we decide to use for a project, influence the human resources to buy in to the project, and

creating a clear schedule with clear objectives and goals. If we can succeed in doing these things,

then the challenges the human resource can eventually bring can be fought and conquered!
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Works Cited
Halabuda, P. (2021, April 23). Common Resource Management Challenges and How to Overcome Them.
Retrieved from Teamdeck.io: https://teamdeck.io/project-management/resource-management-
challenges/