Expert: Todd Binenstock - 5/24/2007

Question
What are companies actually using to prevent scheduling confilts among teams sharing staff?  I really can't find an article about this and that is a mystery.

Answer
Hi Don,

I am not aware that any concrete measures are in place to do that.  My clients have used a combination of measures including:

1.  Time allocations for shared resources, to cover meeting and non-meeting project time.
2.  Meeting scheduling software (such as Outlook) which notifies meeting schedulers of conflicts when planning meetings.  Project Managers plan meetings so that critical attendees do not have conflicts, if at all possible.  Other attendees must work with their managers to choose which meetings to attend.
3.  Escalation to management to resolve resource demand conflicts, such as simultaneous peak demand periods, if they can not be resolved between project managers.

An automated system to resolve such conflicts would have to prioritize the team members so that certain inevitable conflicts can be resolved.  I think it would be very difficult to take the human factor completely out, as the criticality of resources change over time and there are multiple strategies to resolve them (change priorities, new resources, overtime, etc.)

I hope this helps.

Don't forget to rate me.

Todd