Last time we looked at the most common question you get when talking to senior leaders - how to control spend. This time, we'll look at probably the next most common one - how to control resources. By control resources, I don't mean how to tell people what to do. What I mean is how to keep control of resource numbers. In non-business speak, that means "how can I manage the number of people in my team and still deliver?" This is, of course another side to the "how do I control costs" discussion, and is a particular problem for IT departments.

The answer seems obvious - just stop hiring people. Set a staff limit and stick to it. The reality for IT departments is a little more complex though and it's related to the way big organisations control the flow of work. Or to be more precise, how they don't control the flow of work.

They say that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. It’s the same in business – when all you have is a project management methodology, everything looks like a project. Most organisations have become very project focused. Everything is a project. New release of software – project. Some process change – project. That’s great. Projects are good. They are certainly better than the ad-hoc approach we had before projects. But projects do have some drawbacks.

To work out what the drawbacks are, we need to look at what a project is. A project is defined (by the PMI who should know) as something that has a defined scope, a defined start and a defined end date.  So projects are finite in length. Anything without an end date isn’t a project, it's business as usual.

When a team is behind its targets, the natural instinct is to work even harder to catch up. Sometimes though, the best thing you can do is… nothing.

Let’s look at a team. For various reasons, they have done several sprints' worth of work with no test environment available. How can this be? Let’s just imagine that they work for a hypothetical large company with a ludicrously complex process around setting up test environments. I’m sure such things never happen in real life, but just go with me on this one.