Guesswork is killing IT delivery. From delays to burnout to lost margins, here’s how effective resource management puts you back in control.
Guessing at resourcing isn’t planning. It’s gambling with delivery.
For IT projects, where margins are tight and stakes are high, that gamble rarely pays off. The fallout is all too familiar: deadlines slip, your best people burn out, and profitability quietly leaks away.
You already know IT project delivery can be messy. A client might change scope halfway through. A single QA bottleneck can throw off an entire release. And when specialist skills are already stretched thin, even small changes can snowball into bigger problems. Without effective resource management, every change hits harder than it should.
This article shows why guesswork undermines delivery, people, and profitability, and how you can replace it with clarity and control. We'll cover:
When resource management is reduced to gut feel (or spreadsheets), leaders lose sight of what’s really happening across their teams. One wrong assignment, overlooked dependency, or overloaded engineer can throw an entire project off course. And the consequences ripple across the business in four key ways.
When allocations don’t align with people’s actual expertise, progress slows and quality drops. A developer unfamiliar with the required framework may take twice as long to complete a task, while assigning AWS cloud architecture work to someone without the correct expertise risks critical errors and damages the firm’s technical credibility.
For firms delivering complex technical solutions, skills mismatches are particularly damaging. Client projects often rely on very specific stacks, systems, or tools, and success depends on putting the right person in the right role at the right time. Without accurate skills data, allocation decisions are basically blind guesses – and the risk of misalignment skyrockets.
The impact of a bad allocation rarely stays contained to one initiative. A delay on one task means dependent work is delayed, QA phases get squeezed, releases slip, and teams are forced into crunch mode in order to hit their deadline. Costs rise, morale drops, and quality suffers.
These overruns aren’t just bad luck. They’re the direct result of planning with poor data and allocating reactively.
When you don’t have a reliable view of capacity or skills, every allocation is a guess. Those guesses compound across multiple initiatives, turning small slips into systemic delivery failures and, eventually, a reputation for being unreliable.
When allocation decisions are made without concrete resource management data, people fall back on habit and personal preference. The same “go-to” people are booked on every high-profile, priority project while others sit on the sidelines.
Over time, this creates two problems:
The business ends up losing strong talent not because of the work itself, but because the allocation process is unfair and limiting. Ultimately, that loss of capacity and institutional knowledge is far harder to replace than any individual project slip.
As Runn co-founder Nicole Tiefensee often says, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Forecasts are only as strong as the data they’re built on.
When resource management relies on gut feel or spreadsheets full of outdated, inconsistent inputs, leaders don’t have a true picture of capacity, skills, or pipeline demand. Without that foundation, every forecast is essentially a guess. And the bigger the project portfolio, the more expensive those guesses become.
Because decisions aren’t grounded in accurate data, leaders can’t confidently answer critical questions: Can we take on this new client? Are we hitting utilization targets? Which services are in highest demand?
The result is silent margin leakage. High bench time eats into profitably while too little capacity forces firms to decline new work or hire expensive contractors in order to meet demand.
Want to stop gambling with delivery? These five practices will turn guesswork into effective resource management, giving you clarity, control, and the confidence to grow without burning out your people (or your margins).
When availability is spread across spreadsheets, HR tools, and managers’ heads, no one has a complete view of capacity. And guesswork thrives when your systems are fragmented.
Centralization provides a single source of truth for people, projects, and spend. With improved visibility, leaders can spot conflicts, plan proactively, learn from real data, and make informed trade-offs.
Many firms start by moving away from spreadsheets. Platforms like Runn pull everything into one place, so you can see workloads and project spend at a glance, and make better staffing calls.
Further reading: The Resource Centralization Playbook for Custom Software & IT Solutions ➡️
Too many IT solutions businesses plan resources reactively, taking a short-term approach to staffing. In practice, this looks like only reviewing allocations once a project is confirmed, recruiting when clients demand faster turnarounds, or forgetting to factor in leave. In other words, doing resource management on demand.
While reactive resourcing isn't an evil to be avoided at all costs (all teams have to pivot at the last minute from time to time), proactive resource management provides a greater strategic focus that can benefit your business, your customers, and your people.
Proactive planning means actively managing resources to achieve specific organizational objectives, by:
Proactive resource management isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about preparing your business for what’s ahead, so you can absorb change, meet client expectations, and grow with confidence, instead of firefighting.
IT projects don’t run on generic roles. Assigning “a developer” to a project won’t cut it if the task requires deep AWS knowledge or experience with a specific framework.
The more granular you get about people’s real skills when doing resource management, the more accurately you can assign work and avoid bottlenecks, getting the right people on the right projects at the right time.
A practical starting point is building a skills matrix that maps people’s real capabilities and certifications. For firms juggling multiple client projects, this makes it easier to track skills, identify the right person for the job, distribute opportunities fairly, and avoid the costly mismatches that frustrate clients and teams alike.
Put it into practice: How to Create a Skills Matrix in 6 Steps ➡️
It’s no secret that plans age quickly. A spreadsheet that looked fine last week can already be out of date if scope has shifted, someone’s taken leave, or another project has been pulled forward. The problem is, decisions made on stale information rarely land well, instead leading to misallocation, overspending, and delivery headaches.
Real-time insights flip that dynamic. Instead of relying on guesswork, you can understand the current picture and act with confidence.
Tools like Runn’s Insights Hub make this easy, surfacing live answers to questions like “Are we overbooked next month?” or “Are we hitting utilization targets?” That clarity means you’re not reacting weeks later, but steering projects and people in the moment.
The best resource management processes aren't based around a master spreadsheet. They’re shared, collaborative, and trusted across teams.
When delivery leads, project managers, and ops all share the same plan, conversations stop being about finger-pointing and start being about how to move forward. When communication improves, so does accountability and visibility.
Creating this culture means making capacity a shared priority. That could look like regular resourcing reviews, setting clear utilization targets, and making sure everyone can see the big picture. When your people trust the data and the process, collaboration becomes easier and accountability comes naturally.
Resource guesswork is a silent saboteur. It slows down projects, burns out your best people, and quietly drains profitability. But it doesn’t have to be the way your processes work.
The alternative is effective resource management. With centralized data, proactive planning, skill-based allocation, real-time insights, and a culture of visibility, you replace firefighting with foresight. With the right tools, IT firms move from reactive resourcing to proactive delivery – and eliminate guesswork for good.
