Staffing a project isn't just about who's available; it's about who's right for the work, who's already stretched thin, and who's about to hit a wall two weeks from now if nothing changes. I've been making those calls for over a decade.
My earliest resourcing work was formal: at Organic (an Omnicom agency), I held a dedicated resource management role using ChangePoint to track utilization, flag conflicts, and allocate talent across concurrent projects. It was there I learned that the spreadsheet is the easy part, the real skill is in the conversation you have before you fill in the cell. In later roles, resourcing became less formal but no less important. At Adobe, I coordinated across distributed creative teams, managing competing priorities and keeping production staffed without direct authority over headcount. At agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi and Kane & Finkel, I worked inside team structures where the PM's ability to protect capacity directly affected creative quality and on-time delivery.
I've also worked extensively at the intersection of creative and technical resourcing, understanding not just who's available, but what kind of work they do well, and where the handoffs need to happen.