Plan resource management is the process of defining how to estimate, acquire, manage and use team and physical resources. What makes up your resources? Well, there are team members, supplies, materials, equipment, services and facilities, just to name a few. These resources can come from within the organization or from outside through procurement. And the outputs of this process should include project schedule, requirements documentation, a stakeholder register, and your risk register. Make sure you consider all the other enterprise environmental factors associated with your project, the organizational culture, the resources you have available, the existing marketplace, existing policies or agreements. Your organization may already have resources available for your use. And it may have agreements with specialists, contractors or other organizations. Finding this out early will help you develop your plan. As you develop your plan, you need to make sure you organize it in a meaningful and useful way. Some ways to organize your plan and data are hierarchical charts, such as work breakdown structures, organizational breakdown structures and resource breakdown structures. These are hierarchical and tiered formats. Text-oriented formats like organizational charts. These charts will show you the relationships between people, as well as all their roles within the organization, who has decision-making authority and the expectations associated with them. Another tool is the responsibility assignment matrix, or a RAM. They can also be called a RACI chart, which we discussed in earlier modules. And this will help you identify the personnel associated with a specific task and their level of responsibility, which can vary. As we discussed before, the different levels in a RACI chart are responsible, accountable, consult and inform. Responsible, and this is the person that will actually do the work. Although some of it can be delegated, it falls on this person to get the job done. The person that's in an accountable status is a person who has the authority to say that the specified work is completed. Many times this person is also responsible for the work. But there are times when someone else might do the work and need this person's approval saying that it meets the requirements and is complete. People in the consulting status, this is someone that you'll communicate with throughout the project, and they may offer input. The informed role, these are people that get updates on progress or when the work is actually completed. So let's look at our RACI chart example. As you can see in this example, Aaron is both responsible and accountable for writing the project charter. Beth is responsible for creating the work breakdown structure, but Aaron is accountable for making sure it gets done. And Beth is accountable for the stakeholder engagement that Charlie, Donna and Earl are working on. So you can see by this example, everyone should know what they're expected to do and who is accountable for insuring that it is completed to standard. I'm sure most of you have had an instance when you thought someone else was going perform a task just to find out that they thought the same of you, and neither of you got it done. Well, this can be prevented by using a RACI chart. Now that we've gone through the planning phase of this process, the next step is to make sure that you have the appropriate outputs completed and have established the plan the best you can. Outputs for the planning phase are identifying the needed resources, guidance on how to acquire the team and physical resources, roles and responsibilities, including authority, responsibility and competence, project organizational charts, the team resource management plan, how the team will be defined, staffed, managed and released, training, team development, a recognition plan, team charter. And that's just to name a few. Remember, this is your planning phase. This is how you're going to accomplish things. With these things completed or planned for, you should be well on your way to move into the next step in this process, which is estimating the activity resources.