Ready to build more flexible, adaptable, and engaged project teams? Here's how to introduce agile resource management to your projects.
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While rigid staffing procedures may work for certain organizations, more people are starting to favor flexibility in managing their resources.
But what exactly is agile resource management? Unlike the traditional ‘plan and execute’ resource management model, agile emphasizes flexibility.
With this mindset, resource planning isn’t inflexible. Team members are assigned and reassigned work between projects based on changing requirements and the skills needed to meet those requirements. The result? Faster delivery, efficient resource utilization, and improved quality deliverables.
Admittedly, though, nailing agile resource management isn’t a piece of cake. It’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you overcome expected challenges. We also share insider tips from experts in the field who have used the agile methodology to effectively manage resources.
Agile resource management is the practice of effectively allocating and managing resources in a flexible manner.
Unlike traditional resource management, the agile methodology isn’t rigid in terms of planning, allocating, and managing resources. Instead, the agile resource management framework is adaptable — flexibly changing per project, stakeholder, and employee requirements with proactively planning and reallocating resources.
For resource and project managers who are used to the idea of having their project resource plans all buttoned up and approved before project kick-off, the thought of introducing a more fluid management ethos to resourcing might seem counterintuitive. But there are great benefits to be enjoyed.
Agile teams are able to adjust quickly to changes in project scope, priorities, or resources. By working in short, iterative cycles, they continuously optimize resource allocation based on real-time needs and performance, ensuring they remain aligned with project goals.
The iterative approach also improves risk management by identifying bottlenecks early and preventing overallocation of resources if the project scope deviates from original plans.
Agile teams self-organize, drawing in team members from different functions and disciplines, making resource allocation visible, and promoting shared ownership of work - in turn creating an environment of greater accountability and engagement.
Agile resource planning prioritizes tasks based on their value to the project. The most important tasks are resourced first - leading to more effective use of team members’ time and skills.
As agile teams are often cross-functional and interdisciplinary, this aids better workload distribution and reduced dependency on specific individuals. This ensures that team members’ skills are fully utilized and workloads are balanced.
Given that the agile framework for managing resources is so fluid, it can be demanding to adjust resources between projects.
Context-switching — as human resources move between projects — can also impact employee productivity and slow project progress as employees get up to speed with project requirements and challenges.
If left unaddressed or under-managed, these challenges can grow to negatively impact the success of this resource management framework.
The first step to improving your odds of success here? Knowing what challenges you’re going to face.
As you allocate employees to multiple projects according to their skills, moving them to other projects can potentially lead to resource clashes.
Keeping tabs on changing project priorities and proactively communicating them across teams is yet another related challenge.
This challenge further amplifies among small teams with a limited skill pool. In that case, when an employee with a specific skill set is working on a particular project, it becomes almost impossible to move them to another project without jeopardizing the success of the work they’re already doing.
While moving people from project to project, it’s common to lose sight of their workload, leading to uneven work distribution, and even employee burnout.
In several instances, this challenge can culminate in the overutilization of certain resources and underutilization of others, leading to skewed capacity planning.
Read on: Agile Capacity Planning 101: Theory + Tools ➡️
This challenge often crops up when organizations move from a traditional resource management system to an agile one.
There’s extensive mindset shifting required as stakeholders, team leads, and employees grasp the switch from ‘plan and execute’ to ‘adjust on the go.’ Naturally, this change in the way people have typically worked leads to resistance to change.
Keep reading: Unlocking Change: 11 Steps to a Successful Change Management Process ➡️
For agile resource management to be a success, teams need to maintain clear and consistent communication in a fast-paced environment with ever-changing project requirements.
Not only does it take strong communication between team leads and employees (as they assign new projects and tasks to employees) but also across teams and among employees.
Now, of course, the challenges shared above aren’t unsolvable. With a strong action plan to counter each, you can quickly and efficiently nail agile resource management.
And to help you with that, we brought experts on board to share their insider tips for unlocking success. Here’s what they recommend:
Flexibility is a core pillar in agile resource management. But what exactly is it?
Put simply, flexibility is the ability to quickly adapt to changing project requirements to ensure the project stays on track to success.
Naresh Noolu, the Global Resource Manager at Udemy, believes that embracing the flexibility of agile is what generates the best outcomes for clients:
Clients can come back to us at any point with a redefined requirement, and we can start working on the redefined requirement and work on iterative developments as requirements change aggressively."
To be flexible yourself, you need to:
This involves developing a strong grip on your resource pool, their skills, and availability.
But that’s not all, you also need to continuously reassess project tasks to review what’s changing and what new skills/employees would be fit to complete them.
Such a dynamic approach allows teams to realign resources as project needs shift, ensuring that the right skills are applied where they are most needed at any given time.
As Nareen shares:
With Scaled Agile, we can have a dynamic resource allocation, which means we actually adapt ourselves to the changes within the projects, and we continuously reassess and reallocate resources as and when required.”
Practically, this means you should:
Further reading: What is a Skills Inventory and How to Build One? ➡️
One of the best ways to lead your agile team to efficiency is to lead with empathy.
Take the time to understand what engages team members and invest in educating them on the changing requirements and their needs. This ensures employees remain motivated and aligned with the project’s goals.
Calwyn Costa, ex-Ericsson and a specialist in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), advises:
We understand the problem always going back to the human-centered design […]. Touch on empathy: how do you feel about it? What is the need for this?”
In short, to be human-centered is to remember your employee’s engagement is an essential aspect of your agile resource management work. In turn, emotionally engaging team members requires empathy.
Meaning, focus on the following:
Yet another key to the success of agile projects is integrating continuous learning into the workflow.
We identify potential learning opportunities, and you build that as part of your process,” Calwyn explains. “We also think about learning as not something that happens as a one- off. It’s sort of continuously looking at the work coming ahead of time.”
In action, your to-do list here is the following:
Remember: by recognizing skills gaps and addressing them proactively, teams can upskill in real-time, which is essential in a rapidly changing project environment.
Any project which is going through an agile [transition] also needs to make sure that they have a resource planning team in place — [an] expert level resource management is needed,” recommends Naresh.
In a traditional setup, a project manager plans resources. But agile methods, require a more fluid and responsive approach to managing resources. This is why, you need expert resource planning within agile projects — ideally, a person or team that takes care of resource planning thoroughly.
This person or team (depending on your organization’s size), is also responsible for tracking changing project requirements, maintaining a skills inventory, and integrating learning and development into resource management.
As we wrap this up, it’s essential to reiterate that flexibility, proactive communication, continuous learning, and empathy are core pillars of an agile resource management methodology.
The parting tips we’ve shared below all reflect these pillars:
Remember, agile resource management can be challenging to unlock but not impossible to leverage.
With a mindset and cultural shift to flexibility in agile resource planning and allocation, you’ll be halfway through reaping the widely known benefits of this methodology.
Ready to invest in agile resource planning and allocation? We recommend starting small.
Begin with flexibly planning resources for one project before experimenting with it on different projects. This will show you what’s working and what needs improving so you can reiterate your agile processes as you build them.
Lastly, as a small next action step, review and follow these dos and don’ts of planning in agile settings ➡️
