Introduction
We will be covering project resources. There are three types of project resources:
People (Work Resources)
People in a project usually consist of a project team (which is a group of people who report to a project manager). The project manager needs to manage the team’s workload and time, as the members usually have day jobs, and may be part of other projects.
Capital (Cost Resources)
Capital is anything that a business owns which can generate more revenue, such as cash, intellectual capital, investments, real estate, and financial securities.
There are four types of capital:
- Debt capital, which is capital lent to the business from another source, such as loans
- Equity capital, which is the capital raised by selling shares in the business
- Trading capital, which is capital used to trade or invest, such as bonds or stocks
- Working capital, which refers to the capital that the business owns, such as:
- Business bank accounts, which are accounts that are opened under the business name and are used for business transactions only. It also helps the business owner separate the business transactions from transactions made under their personal bank account
- Receivable accounts, which is money owed by a customer to a business for products/services that the customer has used but not paid for yet
- Payable accounts, which is credit (which is an agreement between a borrower and a lender, where the borrower receives money or valuable assets, which needs to be repaid to the lender by a certain date) that the business owes to another business for products/services
- Liquid cash, which is something that can sold for cash, or is cash in hand
- Cash equivalents, which is the total value of liquid cash that the business currently owns
Material Goods (Material Resources)
Material resources relate to the assets of the business used in projects that can be seen or touched. These include the following;
- Business machinery, which is machinery (such as a computer) that is designed especially for business use. An example is the IBM ThinkPad series of laptops (which were later manufactured by Lenovo, who bought IBM’s PC and laptop line in May 2005), announced in April 1992 and released in October 1992 with the introduction of the IBM ThinkPad 700 (which was later renamed to the IBM ThinkPad 700T when newer models were introduced into the ThinkPad series of laptops)
- Real estate, which is land and any permanent buildings owned by the business, natural or man-made
- Raw materials, which are materials used in the manufacture of products, including;
- Minerals
- Coal
- Natural gases
- Plastic
- Forest resources such as wood
- Lumber
- Petrol
- Grain
- Corn
- Oil
- Steel
- Manufactured products, which is the end result of the processing of raw materials using;
- Chemical processing
- Machinery
- Human labour
- Tools
- Software licenses, which is a legal document with guidelines for the distribution and use of software
Conclusion
We have covered project resources. Project resources include people (work resources), capital (cost resources) and material goods (material resources).
