You never seem to have enough resource right? Well, next time you think about picking up the phone to your recruitment agent or dip in to your pool of freelancers, have a think about how much resource you actually have by looking closely at your schedules or work flow.

Many times, we have been ambushed by project managers after a team meeting saying “we must have more resource, we can’t schedule any more work!”

In our experience, in only 1/10 of those cases have they been right.

Most of the time, having looked at the schedule we have been able to find more availability by looking at the following:

1. Ensure that any resource booked on your schedule has been signed off correctly in contract form and any upfront monies have been paid. If not, question why has the time been booked.
2. Have your project managers block booked out their preferred developers in advance, just in case something urgent comes up? There is nothing wrong in having a reactive team for emergencies….but don’t book out your best resource….just in case.
3. In situations where client projects are mid development, have they made all payments up to date? For example, you have just completed the design stage of a big project and are about to start development with a huge chunk of resource booked going forward. It will be worth checking that milestone payments are up to date. If they aren’t, then this can be used as leverage to collect payment and if they don’t pay, pull the resource from the schedule and give it to some one else!
4. Are the right people on the right projects? You have a need for .net resource, but your .net developer is booked doing an HTML template…look closely at your skills sets and make sure that the right resource is on the right project. If not, switch them round.
5. Where you have retainers, make sure that you monitor the time spent carefully. If the client pays for 10 hours, only book and resource 10 hours. Ensure the team don’t spend more than 10 hours on the client. If they need more time, get it agreed with the client that they will pay for the extra time.
6. Make it a rule that your Project Mangers (or Production Manager, Studio Managers or Traffickers) print their schedules and put it up on the wall, call a meeting and review EVERY week with other Project Managers, Account Managers, Finance Department, New Business Teams also in attendance so everyone is aware where the business is at!