Recently, a Colleague of mine who is residing and working in Germany reached out for some assistance. In his new role of Project Manager for an IT organization, he was struggling with having his project resources being pulled into operational issues, thereby affecting his project timelines. While the organization could not afford dedicated project resources, they were still looking to him to balance the needs of the project against the daily operational needs that were or could affect the Uptime and Availability of the organization.

Here are some highlights of the discussion we had:

• Clearly define the resourcing requirements
• Define the risks associated with lack of dedicated resources and the potential impact to quality and project timelines
• Have a communication plan in place to ensure all stakeholders are aware of tasks slipping, risk events materializing, etc
• Ensure focus is on organizational uptime and availability. If there are outages that are impacting the organization, they take priority.
• Review the assigned resources previous workloads to anticipate any disruptions to project timelines
• Review outage reports for the organization to anticipate impact to project resources
• What else can be looked at?

Net is, as a new Project Manager, having the right management and governance systems in place is critical to the health and success of the project. These systems will allow you to deal with any disruptions and ensure those disruptions are being mitigated effectively.

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