BUSI 415 Week 2 Project: Resource Management Plan Example

Resource Management Plan: Fairmont Hills Community Recreation Center

Project Summary

The City of Fairmont Hills will build a 32,000-square-foot community recreation center with a gymnasium, a fitness area, three multipurpose rooms and a teaching kitchen. Council has approved $6.8 million for the work and expects the doors to open fourteen months after design approval. The city's Parks and Recreation Department sponsors the project; design is complete, and construction will be performed under contract by a general contractor selected through the city's sealed-bid process. The project manager, Jordan Ellis, is a city employee assigned full time from the Public Works Department.

This plan follows the process the PMBOK Guide calls Plan Human Resource Management (Project Management Institute, 2013), whose output, the human resource management plan, defines how project roles are identified, staffed, managed and eventually released. Dinsmore and Cabanis-Brewin (2014) stress that this planning matters most in organizations where the project manager borrows people from functional departments, which is the city's situation. Equipment and materials are covered in the procurement management plan; this plan covers people.

Roles and Responsibilities

The project requires the roles below. City staff remain employees of their home departments and are assigned to the project for a defined share of their time.

The RACI chart below assigns the major deliverables. In each row, R marks the people doing the work, A the single person answerable for it, C those whose advice is sought and I those kept up to date.

Each row has a single accountable person, so no decision can fall between two departments. The chart also exposes overload early: the project manager is accountable for four of the five deliverables, which is why the construction manager and procurement officer carry the doing of most of them. If a row ever shows two As, the steering committee will settle which department owns the outcome before the work begins, rather than in the middle of a dispute.

Project Organization

The project uses a balanced matrix. Team members report to the project manager for project work and to their functional managers for performance reviews, pay and their other duties. The project manager reports to the sponsor, who chairs a steering committee with the directors of Public Works, Finance and Information Technology. A balanced matrix was chosen over a dedicated project team because the city builds a major facility only every few years; hiring full-time project staff would leave them idle afterward, while borrowing staff keeps their knowledge in the departments that will run and maintain the building. The steering committee meets monthly to approve changes above $25,000 and to settle disputes over staff time. The general contractor reports to the construction manager under the terms of its contract and is not part of the city's team structure.

Staffing Management Plan

Staff Acquisition

Each city role is filled by negotiation with the functional manager concerned, confirmed in a written assignment memo signed by the sponsor that states the percentage of time, the start and end dates and the person's backup. Dinsmore and Cabanis-Brewin (2014) note that such agreements protect the project when departmental priorities shift. No new hires are planned; if the IT specialist's time proves insufficient during systems installation, the city's existing contract with a network vendor will be used.

Resource Calendar

Staffing rises and falls with the project's phases.

Staff Release

Each person returns to their department when their deliverables are accepted. The procurement officer's assignment drops to 10 percent after contract award, and the construction manager is released after the final inspection and punch list. Releasing people on a known date, announced a month ahead, keeps functional managers willing to lend staff for the next project.

Training Needs

Three training needs are planned. The construction manager and the project manager will complete the city's contract administration course before the contract is awarded. Team members who have not used the city's project management software will receive a two-hour session in Month 1. In Month 13, the program coordinator will train front desk and fitness staff on the registration system and the building's emergency procedures, using vendor materials.

Recognition, Rewards and Team Development

Because the project manager does not control pay, recognition must work through the people who do. At each phase gate, the project manager will send a short note to each member's functional manager describing that person's contributions, and the sponsor will recognize the team at a city council meeting at substantial completion.

Development is planned rather than left to chance. Tuckman (1965) found that new groups pass through forming, storming, norming and performing, and the plan responds to each: a kickoff workshop in Month 1 sets ground rules and decision rights; a facilitated session after the first monthly report addresses disagreements before they harden; weekly coordination meetings, kept to thirty minutes, establish norms; and from Month 4 the team runs its own progress reviews. Belout and Gauvreau (2004) studied the effect of human resource management on project success and found that its influence was weaker than expected and depended on the project's structure and phase. That finding argues for targeted practices at the points where people matter most, such as the move from construction to opening, rather than for programs the team has no time to use.

Compliance and Safety

City personnel policies apply to all team members, including overtime rules for hourly staff during the opening month. All staff entering the site must complete the contractor's site safety orientation and wear the required protective equipment; the construction manager will keep a log of orientations. The general contractor is responsible for its own workers' safety under its contract, and the project manager will review the contractor's safety reports monthly.

Biblical Integration

Exodus records Moses sitting from morning to evening to settle the people's cases alone, until Jethro, his father-in-law, told him he would wear himself out and urged him to put trustworthy, capable people in charge of layered groups of the people, so that ordinary disputes were settled below him and only the hard ones reached him (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Exodus 18:13-26). The principle shapes this plan in two ways. Decision rights are delegated in writing, with a $25,000 threshold below which the project manager decides and above which the steering committee does, so that the project manager is not a bottleneck. And each person is chosen for capability and character, which is why the plan asks functional managers to assign people by name rather than send whoever is available.

Conclusion

This plan identifies the roles the recreation center needs, assigns each deliverable to one accountable person, sets out how city staff will be obtained, scheduled, trained, recognized and released, and plans the team's development through its early stages. The project manager will revise it at every phase gate, and the communication, risk and procurement plans that follow are built on its roles.

References

Belout, A., & Gauvreau, C. (2004). Factors influencing project success: The impact of human resource management. International Journal of Project Management, 22(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(03)00003-6

Dinsmore, P. C., & Cabanis-Brewin, J. (Eds.). (2014). The AMA handbook of project management (4th ed.). AMACOM.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Project Management Institute. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (5th ed.). Project Management Institute.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100