Moving away from central planning to free market interactions for resource planning in enterprise

Consultancy in general is highly dependent on talented people. Sadly the way things are planned are still highly centralized and follow a dictatorship in the communist era with a central planning department. This leaves very little for talents to express themselves. It begs the question, is this really the right way to engage in resource planning just because it has been “the way” it has been done for decades?

The current trajectory of solutions tend to be focused on technology and the collection of more data. With more data, better decisions can be made. The authority and responsibility is still held by a central power. In general this has not worked too well looking at another example from the political field — communism. The only communist country that is prospering is China and even their economic model follows a free market approach (with some heavy handedness through the control of state owned enterprises but let’s put that aside first). In general, free markets tend to perform better by allowing proper competition and removing anti competitive behavior. What if resource planning can become more laissez faire with some ground rules that limit bad behavior.

So how would it work?

Within companies, resources tend to look up their own projects and reach out to project managers (similar to looking for a job on an internal job board). Project managers can also choose to look up their own resources. There is also an option for project managers to trade resources. In essence, good behavior should be rewarded: good resources receive more offers for projects; good project managers receive more requests. This ensures only good people stay on to deliver the work and manage projects. Bad actors are weeded out. There is a minimal need for complicated technologies except perhaps a simple marketplace portal that allows transparency of resource ability and projects (so a combination of Glassdoor and Linkedin?).

Without the heavy handedness of a central planner there would be less waste (minimally you can remove the headcount of the bean counters). You replace process with passionate people. There is also a possible added benefit of having people talk to each other in the company creating a network effect. Projects would be fielded with people who are passionate, attrition should drop and quality should improve. (I know it’s all assumptions but it’s a nice dream :D).