Acquiring resources is the process of obtaining team members, facilities, equipment, materials, or any other resources necessary to complete the work associated with your project. These things can come in the form of both internal assigned or external acquired resources and should be negotiated for by the Project Manager. Building your project team is a critical step in this plan. When doing so, you should first look at the existing people in your organization and on your current team. Many of the skills you may need might already exist inside your current team and you need to start by making arrangements to add those people to your project team as quickly as you can. But if you're missing specific skills, you're going to need to start looking for additional people and start negotiating towards their acquisition. In doing this, consider any constraints that might impact the project and each member of the team. Are there any budget, time or existing projects that you need to consider? Will your team organization be projectised or fall on matrix? Remember consider all these things when selecting your team members. Finding out that you have conflicts after you've built your team will create headaches much later on. If you as the project manager fail to acquire all those resources is going to adversely affect your project. Think about the people, the materials all those things. So it's important that you do an accurate estimate and acquire the people and materials necessary to complete the job. Make sure you identify any other constraints that might impede your ability to get these done. And if you find any, you need to come up with a solution. Some tools that you can use to help you in this process are decision making and one thing that you can do is use multi criteria decision analysis which basically means picking the best out of many based on availability, cost, ability, experience, knowledge and skills, and it's very useful in this phase and will help you pick the best people and materials suited for the job. Another thing you can use, your interpersonal skills and they're going to come into play in this process because you're going to have to negotiate with people or supplies, potentially with other functional managers, suppliers or other external organizations like unions or governmental agencies. You're also going to have, you might have a case where your resources are preassigned. You may have a sponsor who insists that a certain personal resource be used during the project. Let's talk a little bit about acquiring these things. One way to acquire the best resources is through virtual teams. We talked about building your team but people may not be available or they might be geographically displaced. In today's global atmosphere, virtual teams open a lot of opportunities for much larger, diverse and geographically displaced teams. These teams can add a lot of expertise and can save you money due to reduced travel. One major challenge with this type of team is communication though. It becomes increasingly important that you have a very solid communications plan when working this type of team. With this part of the process completed, you should have the ability to assign your physical resources and your project team and give them the specific assignments that you need them to do. Keep in mind at this point you'll need to have work schedules establish that show the start and end dates for all the work that you're planning, make sure that you account for shifts, for holidays, or any other pieces of information that may create a challenge with your resources and their availability both material and human. Now that we've acquired our resources and team, what's the next step? Well, it's develop your team.