Staff costs straining the budget? Project demand increasingly unpredictable? Adaptive resourcing strategies can help you chart a course through rocky times.
Inconsistent project influx, unpredictable workloads, a gulf between in-demand skills and available expertise in the labor market – it all quickly translates into fluctuating demand for human resources.
Left unaddressed, the problems compound, ultimately increasing staffing costs and putting a strain on your business.
The solution? Create adaptive resourcing management processes that ensure you have the right folks to work on the right projects at the right time.
But creating cost-effective, adaptive resourcing strategies takes extensive strategic planning with a ton of data digging. The benefits, though? They make it all worth the work.
Here’s what you need to be doing:
Resource forecasting helps team leads and project managers understand whether available resources will be able to complete current and upcoming projects within their defined timeline.
Using the estimates you find, you can create a proactive – not reactive – resourcing system. Start with the following steps:
But to ensure your resource demand estimates are as close to accurate as possible, gather data from other sources too. This includes your:
An interlock process is a functional, structured approach to stakeholder engagement, determining who the relevant stakeholders are and how they will work together to support decision-making related to your resources.
The planning process decides:
Planning and establishing an interlock process at your organization is increasingly essential for making informed decisions for fluctuating resource needs and beating resource scarcity before it grows into a costly challenge.
The end goal, you ask? The interlock committee meets and collaborates on data to create an interlock report featuring accurate data on current and potential projects to inform resource/demand forecasting.
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Data from an interlock report offers an accurate summary of needed resources versus available resources. From there, you can better address gaps, right-size your team, and mitigate risks.
Further reading: What is an Interlock Report in Staffing & How to Create One ➡️
Another key step to creating adaptive resource strategies is gathering an accurate estimate of projects that are likely to close.
Since this metric isn’t about projects in the pipeline, but the likelihood of how many would close or begin, your sales team should own it.
Sales can determine the probability by taking the number of closed projects in a forecasting period, dividing them by the total number of projects in the pipeline, and multiplying by 100% for a percentage value:
Probability of projects closing = projects actually closed/total projects in pipeline x 100%
It’s essential here that sales takes full accountability for the timely delivery and accuracy of this estimate so project leads can work on determining resource availability for upcoming projects.
Note that you can best achieve sales forecasting accuracy when team leads from delivery teams collaborate with the sales team. This ensures project/delivery teams share accurate data on how long it realistically takes to accomplish project tasks and take different projects to completion. Sales can then use this data to build pipeline and make accurate sales revenue reports and forecasts.
Dig deeper: Resource Planning for Multiple Projects: A Complete Guide for 2025 ➡️
A resource or skills inventory is a centralized pool packing in up to date information on your existing employees’ skills and availability.
Using it, you can quickly find the right resources with the right skills for ongoing and upcoming projects at the right time.
An accessible, easy-to-use skills inventory facilitates adaptive management, ensuring you find the best-fit people for projects, based on their skills. This mitigates the risk of allotting individuals to projects based on favouritism or personalities, a common challenge among service teams.
If you’ve multiple departments or service lines, go further into building function-specific skill lists. In such a case, your resource inventory should give you both a centralized skills view (for stakeholders) and a department-specific skills view (for different service lines).
In turn, such a detailed resource inventory helps in two broad areas:
These resources could be from your department or borrowed from another department(s).
When you use a skills-first approach to assigning projects to employees, you can easily borrow resources from another department when faced with a shortage or availability clash.
To this end, work on identifying unavailable resources within your department. Find out what skills you’ll need that the available resource(s) are bringing to the table, the project in question, its requirements, and the risk involved. Then use your skills inventory and work with the department head to backfill the role.
Depending on the skill requirement, resource prioritization can serve as both a short-term and long-term solution. However, you’ll want to regularly gather feedback to evaluate how well the (borrowed) employee can understand your project and client requirements.
You’ll also want to promote productive dialogue between team leads to understand if resource sharing negatively impacts their workflow.
Another alternative to meeting temporary resource demand is bringing on contractors to fill the space.
Again, this takes identifying the skills in demand, then finding third-party contractors with the correct skill set. Project leads, in collaboration with the human resources/recruitment department, can work on this.
If you find yourself using contractors frequently or to meet fluctuating seasonal demand, it helps to include the contractors you work with in your resource inventory. Include their day rate/pricing, availability, contact details, and skills to make it easy to find and reach out to trusted contractors.
Adaptive resourcing is key to managing fluctuating resource demand without increasing your costs or negatively impacting employee engagement. It’s also essential for strategically overcoming resource-related unforeseen challenges.
However, you can only drive most of these benefits if you prioritize gathering and using the right data to make informed decisions.
Adaptive resourcing delivers the best results when stakeholders are proactively involved in the process, providing the needed support and making quick decisions together.
