Shawn -- perhaps you meant your question to be an
organizational/political one. There may be other forums
for management issues of this nature, but I would rely on
your corporate or agency hierarchy to resolve this.
Someone in the organization "owns" the resources that you
need, and that are coming to you late. Someone else high
up in the organization "owns" the project you are working
on, as sponsor or champion or whatever. These people need
to meet and duke it out. As a PM you can prepare for and
facilitate such a meeting, but in my experience a PM can't
command in this situation -- you have to persuade and let
higher powers decide. Formalizing the problem with a
meeting not only helps get a resolution but it also helps
shift responsibility for delays from you to others who are
causing them, and its always nice to shift blame away from
oneself to its rightful owners!
Anyway, I find Dale's approach to be a nice one if you are
talking about the technical side of managing this issue in
Project. All I would add to Dale's answer is that you
might find it convenient to consolidate all the projects
involved into a single mega-project, where all the various
start dates can be seen, filtered, and sorted as
necessary. Also, I sometimes create one or more
milestones in my schedules called "key resources
available" or something similar, showing when I expect to
get my various key resources. My work tasks are linked as
successors to those milestones, as appropriate. Then, in
the Tracking Gantt that Dale recommends, you can clearly
show that slippages are starting with (and due to) the
slippage in such milestones. This brings the resource
problem out of the closet (the hidden resource
availability schedule) into the open on the Gantt Chart.
Regards,
David Hunsberger
Microsoft Project Instructor
www.it7.com