The “Resource” Myth

The reason money is so popular is that it’s a fungible unit of energy. I earn a dollar at work and spend it at a restaurant without any loss in value a long the way. Thus eliminating my need to only patronize restaurants where I can barter Agile coaching for dinner. It’s a good system.

But problems arise when business treat employees the way consumers treat dollars. Does this sound familiar? A manager with the spreadsheet looks at available resources then allocates that resource to projects that needs that resource’s skills. And this is usually done partially across several projects; 50% here 25% there and 15% waaaaaaay over there.

Need to move faster? No worries we’ll just allocate you a few more partial resources and your project will speed up for sure.

This would be great except individuals are not fungible. Not even close.

There is a cost to switching context as each person needs to be brought up to speed and increased numbers require increased overhead coordinating those numbers. And when’s the last time a project manager asked for 50% of your time when that’s what was allocated. Inevitably these lucky resources get asked to do more than they are able in each project and are quickly overwhelmed.

The solution lies in changing how we think about the way people work and adopting a new mindset – a mindset at the core of Agile organizations.

1) Resources are people.
Get used to this. People need to be treated as humans. While I have a kind of moral aversion to using the word “resources” to refer to individuals that’s not the main problem. The problem is that by not acknowledging up front that we are dealing with messy, difficult-to-define people we create a dangerous illusion of control where actually we have none.

2) People work best with other people.
A brief examination of social science, management theory, psychology and even neurobiology will quickly reveal that humans are here to interact with other humans. As a species homo sapiens are hyper social meaning that we function best in groups. Nowhere is this more (and ironically less) true than in the modern corporation.

3) Teams work best when stable.
Changing membership on teams breaks continuity, creates churn and generally disrupts patterns. While pattern disruption can be good for innovation it’s terrible for productivity and morale.

So is it possible to have a fungible unit of production? Actually it is. But we need to change our thinking and the way our organization is structured.

Rather than moving people to projects we need to organize into stable teams and move work to the team NOT the resource to the project.

This requires vision, leadership and discipline. It’s not easy but the payoff is worth it.

How is your business doing?

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