Yes, your budget should account for people’s time.

Too often, I see organizations request services from their internal teams and forget that their employees’ time = money.

An important ingredient in successful project management is also team culture and morale. And, it’s quite demotivating to your team if they feel like their time isn’t worth anything.

As a project manager, you must battle the fickle triple constraint and employee time is a factor — yes, even for in-house teams where there’s a tendency to assume time is endless.

One of the benefits of having an in-house team is knowing the organization can turn to these professionals without fear of receiving an invoice for that 30-minute phone call. However, as a project manager it’s essential that you at least informally monitor team member time — especially when stakeholders can easily bypass you to talk directly with team members.

One way to continuously identify how team resources are bring used is by implementing daily stand ups — used in scrum. This will allow you and your team members to share any roadblocks, task status, and additional comments about back door requests or conversations. It’s still tough, though, and the politics and relationship impact…