If you’re reading this, you likely know the pain of planning a project with limited resources—tight deadlines, too few people, and a restricted budget. You’re also feeling the pressure of having to deliver a successful project despite these resource constraints.
I’ve faced the same challenge, repeatedly finding ways to make the most of what’s available. It hasn’t been easy, but over the past 15+ years, I’ve developed effective tactics for negotiating and managing finite project resources.
In this article, I’ll share tried-and-tested strategies to help you navigate these challenges.
What are resource constraints?
Resource constraints refer to limitations or restrictions on the availability of resources that are essential to achieving a particular objective or completing a task. In project management, potential resource constraints play a crucial role in influencing decision-making processes, managing risk, and determining the feasibility of successful projects.
The main types of resource constraints in project management
Resource constraints are an inevitable part of managing projects. Since projects are temporary endeavors with fixed start and end points, resources are limited by the following factors:
Note: this list only discusses four main resource constraints. It is not exhaustive, as there are also constraints related to materials, and equipment.
Time
Time is crucial as most projects have at least a high-level due date based on stakeholder expectations or external policy.
Time (or the lack of it) dictates everything from how the project is planned to the intensity of the work to how many people should work on it.
Imagine your agency has two weeks to run a marketing campaign for a client’s Black Friday event. With such a short timeline, you must balance the time constraint with the team’s size and project requirements to hit milestones and ensure the campaign is live on time. But you must also do that without compromising quality or team well-being 😱
You might decide to prioritize certain features or increase the number of people on the project team to meet the timeline.
Scope
When it comes to scope, even though your stakeholders may wish for it, you won’t be able to include everything in the project (which is a good thing because you don’t want scope creep to set in).
This constraint means decisions must be made on the most important features or deliverables, as you can’t do it all.
For instance, if you’re leading a team developing new software, you might have to choose which features are necessary for launch and which can wait. This could mean focusing on the core functions that meet most user needs and leaving out the nice-to-have extras until after the initial release.
Cost
Most projects have cost constraints that limit how many hours team members can spend on project execution.
Since the money is finite, you need to plan carefully so your team completes the project without exceeding the budget constraints. If you overspend in one area, you may have to cut back in others, potentially compromising the project’s success.
Let’s assume your videography agency is to produce a commercial for a car company on a tight budget. You might decide to allocate a larger portion of the budget to high-quality video shoots of the car to emphasize its design and features and then opt for more cost-effective solutions for post-production effects.
The limitation of this iron triangle—the interdependent constraints of scope, time, and cost, where changes to one constraint affect the others—is that you can only achieve a maximum of two of the three elements. For example, you’ll have to cut scope if you want to reduce costs and shorten your project schedule. If you can’t make any changes to scope or cost, then it will take longer to execute.
Asides from the triple constraints, but there's one resource that deserves special attention: your people.
People
One of the biggest challenges you might face is a shortage of skilled people to complete a project on time—or not having the right skills available at all. Even when the right people are on your team, they may be stretched too thin to take on additional work.
For example, imagine your content marketing agency needs to publish a research report, which requires a custom landing page. The only Webflow designer available is fully booked until next quarter, leaving you without the necessary expertise to move forward.
To tackle this challenge, you might consider delaying the project until the designer becomes available. You could also negotiate to free up some of their time for your project. Alternatively, bring on additional resources to complete the work if the budget allows it.
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Resolve constraints and allocate work with confidence
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5 tips to manage resource constraints and ensure effective resource allocation
If resource constraints are inevitable, how do you allocate resources properly without risking your portfolio and project health? Here are some tips on how to handle resource constraints:
1. Implement a project selection and prioritization process
Finite resources preclude organizations from taking on every project they’d like. Establish an objective decision-making framework for project prioritization and to ensure that you’re assigning resources to your most important projects.
Examples of that decision-making framework might include alignment with organizational goals, any external dependencies or deadlines, cost-benefit analysis, team capacity, and estimated complexity.
If you’ve been planning projects in Float, your historical data can help you do a quick cost-benefit analysis of future projects.
You can also determine if you should take on a project by looking at the work your team is currently doing and their future capacity in Float.
The visual Schedule lets you quickly see all ongoing and planned projects, who’s working on them, and their timelines. The clear view of capacity makes it easier to say yes or no to incoming projects.
2. Allocate resources to critical project components
To ensure effective project execution, optimize your resource plan around those components that are critical for project success.
Identify the critical path—i.e., the sequence of tasks that represents the longest path to project completion—and make sure those tasks get staffed correctly. If your critical path slips, then the project timeline does too.
You can use resource planning software like Float to help you spot projects that might be missing key team members.
The Project Plan view shows a list of projects, providing a quick overview of the number of people assigned to each project. For instance, if a project is planned with four people, this view helps you quickly identify any discrepancies, such as noticing that the team lacks a designer. From there, you can investigate further to determine if this was intentional or an oversight.
From a budget standpoint, make sure you allocate funds to the project elements that are essential for delivery (e.g., a piece of heavy equipment may be essential for completing a construction project.)
3. Build in contingencies
When you’re making your resource plan, don’t sell yourself short. Make sure to build in sufficient slack for your team's schedule and cushion for your budget to account for unforeseen emergencies. A 10% contingency is usually a safe bet, regardless of your project or organization.
Also, be sure to develop backup plans for how you’ll address project risks. For example, what if a key team member becomes unavailable during the project? What if a key supplier falls through? I typically assume something won’t get done on time and then develop a plan B and C to address that risk.
Fortunately, project planning tools like Float offer scenario planning capabilities so you can map out different contingency plans and understand their impacts on project time frames and budgets. For example, you can scenario plan with tentative tasks and placeholder roles or use scenario forecasts for capacity and budget.
4. Manage stakeholder expectations
Be transparent with stakeholders about the decisions you are making with regard to resourcing and get their buy-in upfront. To be clear, clients don’t necessarily get to choose the specific team members who will work on their projects, but they should agree on the relative prioritization of projects and tasks.
You’ll also need to ensure that stakeholders align on project scope definition to avoid potential misunderstandings later in the project life-cycle. To manage expectations, you’ll want to err on the side of caution by underpromising what you can deliver. Trust me—it’s better than the alternative.
5. Monitor and control resource allocation throughout the project life-cycle
Use a resource management tool like Float (👋) to help you keep on top of resource allocation as the project progresses.
Specifically, you’d want to track key metrics related to resource constraints, including team utilization, resource availability, and time spent.
Resource utilization rates
Resource utilization rates tell you what percentage of time people allocate to your project versus others.
If you use Float, you can check your team’s utilization rates in real-time using the Data range insights feature. It shows you if they are overloaded or if their schedule is realistic.
Your organization should set a sustainable utilization rate–one that avoids underutilization and lack of engagement yet also averts overutilization and burnout.
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🔥 Hot take: there’s nothing wrong with 100% utilization, if you do it right
You’ll rarely get advice telling you to aim for a 100% utilization rate. Why? It implies that your team’s schedule is packed to the brim with work, while allowing zero time for everything else—i.e. a recipe for burnout.
But this isn’t necessarily true: a 100% utilization rate in your resource management software shouldn’t indicate your team is spending 100% of their time on project work; it should mean 100% of their time is accounted for.
In fact, we at Float encourage 100% booking with the explicit understanding that this will account for tasks outside of project work. For example, a copywriter in the Float Schedule might be at 100% allocation for their 40-hour work week, but this is broken down into:
- 34 hours of billable utilization spent on client deliverables
- 2 hours of internal meetings, synced from their Google calendar
- An hour-long cybersecurity training
- 2 hours of administrative tasks
We said it before, and we’ll say it again: the optimal resource utilization rate is yours to determine.
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Resource availability
Your team's availability will vary depending on their workload, time off, and administrative tasks. Resource management tools like Float help you track this by allowing you to filter by role or department and view capacity directly on the schedule.
Time spent
Monitoring time spent on projects helps distribute work efficiently, preventing delays in one project while another comes to a halt.
Float also lets you track time, so you can see how much effort is going into different projects. This helps you plan for any changes and understand how time spent affects project costs. With this information, you can make smarter decisions about how to use your team’s time.
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Justin West
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Former Program Manager at A—B
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Without time tracking data, Justin West, former Program Manager at A—B, struggled to answer important capacity questions. He couldn’t easily see who was overbooked, who had available time, or how much effort was going into each project. To make things more challenging, project information was scattered—budgets, timesheets, and timelines were stored separately, making it difficult to understand how timeline changes impacted budgets and overall project profitability.
"Budgets were in one place, timelines in another, and we created them on an ad-hoc basis for different projects. It wasn’t a crisis, but there was definitely room for improvement.”
With Float, Justin helped drive time-tracking adoption to nearly 100%.
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Make the best use of your resources with Float
With a live view of your team’s schedule, including details about resource availability, capacity, and skills, you can efficiently manage resource constraints, minimizing wasted time and unnecessary costs.
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FAQs
Some FAQs about resource constraints
The resource planning process requires developing a strategy for how to work within resource constraints.
The first step in resource planning is to identify your project budget, timeline, and desired scope. Then, you’ll determine how to deploy resources to achieve your project goals. These resources include people, equipment, materials, and budget.
While you should absolutely negotiate for what you need, don’t put forth a resource plan that requires so much adjustment that you’ll end up wasting valuable time right sizing it in the critical early stages of project execution. You may even lose a potential resource by refusing to consider alternatives to someone already committed to another effort.
Ignoring resource constraints can lead to inefficiencies, missed deadlines, budget overruns, decreased productivity, and ultimately project failure. Limited resources may also result in strained relationships with stakeholders and damage the organization’s reputation, leading to less success in future projects.
Common challenges include:
1. Accurately forecasting resource requirements.
2. Dealing with unpredictable changes in resource availability.
3. Balancing conflicting demands for available resources.
4. Maintaining motivation and morale among team members.
5. Adapting to unforeseen circumstances.
Mitigating these challenges can call for project management software or resource management software.
Resource leveling is a process used to manage resource constraints for a project. This is done by using charts, diagrams, or software to avoid things like project bottlenecks and scheduling conflicts.
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