Staffing

Human resources in an organization are the pillars to its success; they are required to maintain its operations and to participate in new projects. Projects could require recruiting new resources with certain skills, certain abilities and expertise. Project success rely heavily on the quality of project resources, and management are usually facing difficulties with employee turnover, maintain employee motivation, managing team workload, maintain and build in-house knowledge and more. Below I will list and discuss key management issues in IT-project staffing.

· Employee turnover: this is one of the key issues IT organizations and IT departments are suffering from. High employee turnover could downgrade employee productivity, as well increase costs incurred by organization for recruiting new employees, and maintain project performance. It has great impact on project deadlines, budget and scope.

· Manage employee motivation and workloads: demotivated project team produce less that motivated project team, and one of the key challenges management face is keeping high motivation during project timeframe. Management should consider intrinsic and extrinsic motivation techniques to maintain project team motivation. In addition to that, employee workload should be managed, as high workload could result in decrease in motivation and project performance.

· Organization growth: introduction of new projects, and future project team responsibilities should be communicated ahead of time. In my organization we are facing an issue with a new project that resulted in cancelling all vacations for the coming year for all employees. This is a major project and the management believe that vacations assemble a high risk on the project, however if this was communicated properly including project team responsibilities, I believe this could have been avoided either by training employees to replace their colleagues during leave, or any other way.

· Keeping staff knowledge and skills: IT industry is training intensive, IT staff require to keep their knowledge up to date with new technologies. For that IT management should ensure that project team has the required knowledge and conducted in the proper trainings to support the project. Each project might require separate training budget for technical and non-technical team members.

· Knowledge transfer: Since most IT projects require hiring outsourced consultants, management should consider knowledge transfer and handing over sufficient documentation to help internal staff maintain the environment in non project mode.

Identifying and handling above-mentioned key issues help management reduce staffing risks and impact on project success, successful implementation of IT project rely mainly on human resources capabilities, knowledge and motivation. Human resources should be maintained, and satisfied to enhance probability of project success. Identifying listed issues help management in planning and developing projects more wisely.

Reference:

Ahilton, B, Márcio de O., B, & Cláudia M.L., W n.d., 'Staffing a software project: A constraint satisfaction and optimization-based approach', Computers And Operations Research, 35, Part Special Issue: Search-based Software Engineering, pp. 3073-3089, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, viewed 16 June 2012.

Huidan, L 2011, 'PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND ENGINEERING ISSUES', Annals Of The University Dunarea De Jos Of Galati: Fascicle XIV, Mechanical Engineering, 1, pp. 57-60, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 16 June 2012.