Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Resource utilization

In our organization, every server machine that hosts an application has a monitoring system installed on it. The monitoring system tracks the utilization of various machine resources like CPU, memory, disk space, etc... The system raises alerts when some utilization goes beyond a pre-defined threshold and is sustained over a pre-defined period of time.

I received one such alert this morning from one of the machines hosting my application. And, later during the day, I had some very frustrating moments arguing with some managers about resource utilization. Yes, it was about "human" resource utilization.

It seems very strange to me that in an IT organization where human resource is the biggest asset, we have continuous monitoring of server resource utilization but nothing for human resource utilization.

I see many projects being overstaffed and poorly managed. And, at the same time, there are some projects that are understaffed with resources utilized beyond normal thresholds. Senior Management needs to have human resource utilization monitoring in place. Mid-level managers must be held accountable for over-budgeting and over-staffing. Because, over-staffing and over-budgeting of one project invariable means that there is some other project out there that is will not get an appropriate budget or staff.

I hope my managers are reading this !

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