Resource life cycles

Question

How do you manage the various resources who have differing life cycles? For instance a project manager will be the busiest during the initiation phase of a project and then utilized at some level (usually not 100%) during the execution/control phase. For developers the high utilization periods are the execution phase and QA towards the end of that phase (all resources might be utilized throughout the project, but at different utilization levels)...with changing dead-lines, etc...what approach have you used to best utilize the resources during those 'less utilized' periods?

(newly added) To be clear - it's not about scheduling people during the project, but ensuring that they have work activities during parts of the project where they are not 100% needed. Using a QA person to program or a project manager to QA is usually not effective (not their specialty) - it has something to do with slack time, but to much slack time is bad for everyone - and it could require stacking lower priority work on them to ensure there's enough to keep they happily occupied....the question is, How Do you Manage this slack time?

Answer 1

what approach have you used to best utilize the resources during those 'less utilized' periods

Well, technically a project manager should be very involved in the project throughout its lifecycle - think about the words in the title.

Further, this is merely a question on resource management when it comes down to it.

The simple answer is "Make hay when the sun shines."

There are four types of tasks:

1. Urgent, necessary
2. Urgent, unnecessary
3. Non urgent, necessary
4. Non urgent, unnecessary

You should avoid 4 and 2, though sometimes 2 is unaviodable.

When you find yourself 'killing time' you need to think about the processes and tools you can build the turn type 1 tasks into type 3 tasks. For instance if it's hard to release a build due to massive paperwork, think about building software or processes that automate 99% of the paperwork, emails, comments, commits, etc so that releasing something becomes a one click task and your urgent task only takes a few minutes rather than hours.

Answer 2

I suggest you to take a look at CMMI documentation at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/

There do a search for Project Planning and find this http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/models/ACQcompares/PP.pdf

There you will find a very hardcore and academic way of seeing things, but maybe it helps on what you need to know. You will find at page 10 "Define project lifecycle phases on which to scope the planning effort", read it and it might help you to know what you need to :)

Answer 3

Make sure that every team member can assume mupltiple different roles during the project. This will allow people to switch to highly actual activities at all phases of the project.

If someone has nothing to do right now in our team it's usually considered as his or her fault.