Project Constraints

Project Management

Assignment 4

Part one: Resource constraints

Tiffany Coopeland

Professor:

Course:

Date:

Resource Constraints in a project

These include materials and equipment, people as well as project capital, as follows (Resource constraints, 2012);

• Having an insufficient workforce or having people with inadequate skills, not having the right people where they are needed or even a combination of all or some of these.
• Failure to identify critical materials or even all the necessary elements in time delayed purchase of the materials, delayed or lack of logistics, site delivery failures, poor scheduling and network plans, etc.
• Poor equipment type, quantity, size, and even locations, as well as reduced logistics in delivering the equipment to the site.
• Delayed project cash flow, misappropriation of project funds, impacts from regular payments, an insufficient amount of working capital, problems with financing project activities, etc.

Resource-constrained projects suffer from delays, failure to complete specific project tasks, increased criticality of events, increase in schedule complexity, critical paths becomes no longer meaningful, a breakup of the sequence of events, and can at times make parallel events sequential with essential activities with slack becoming noncritical (Egeland, 2014).

What can a project manager do to understand if a potential problem exists?

The project manager should stress on a project schedule and compliance to it since it provides a clear way from the start of the project to the end forcing clients and project stakeholders to be specific with their requirements and project activities at various times during the life of a project (Kerzner, 2017). This helps in ensuring that the project remains on track as per the project schedule. The project manager needs to be clear on their role in the project and the amount of freedom they have. In any case, some compensations may be necessary for the life of the project, maybe resulting from project revisions and changes, a clear outline of the number of adjustments to be made should be made where possible, quantifying them with numbers to easily keep track of things as the project progresses.

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