In my first job, I had dual reporting.
I was doing a project for Walgreens e commerce.
My project manager was responsible for ensuring that I finished the job on time.
Since I was in Bangalore, I also was reporting to the Bangalore resource manager.
My resource manager was responsible for ensuring that all us in Bangalore are busy.
My resource manager would put me on a new project the day he found out that I had completed an ongoing project.
That new project could even be a 2 week training course.
My company had more than 100 such training courses. This ensured that ‘efficiency’ of us engineers was very high.
If I finish my project on Friday, from Monday I would start my training program. If my project manager needed me back on Wednesday for further customization, I had to decline. I told him that I was blocked for 2 weeks (in the training).
This really upset my project manager.
To the point, he asked me to ‘spend a few days in polishing your code’ so that I was not available for resource manager to put on any other project!
Within a few months, it was clear to me :
– the tug of war between project manager and resource manager was by design!
We measure Project managers by their ability to meet their three objectives:
– complete projects on time,
– on budget, and
– to full specifications—
Whereas we measure Resource managers by
– how they keep resources fully utilized.
These are conflicting objectives and have conflicting measures.
So what did we do ?
1. Recognized that 100-percent resource utilization was against the objectives of the project and the organization goal.
2. Planned resource use within and across projects such that the project is completed on time, on budget, and to full specifications.
It is important to break the conflict between Project manager and Resource manager. The minute we design conflicting measurements, we build a door for conflicts.