An important task for project managers in multi-project environments is to effectively choose the right people to the project team. For organizations, it means being able to prioritize and plan human resources among the various projects running in parallel. The purpose of this paper is to describe how a project manager in multi-project environments looks at the allocation of people in their projects. We did our research through literature reviews and interviews with seven project managers.

The research shows that the studied organizations highlight both the expertise and the personal factors in an election. They do not use any specific personality test to identify their staff. The most important thing for them is instead the area of competence, although personality is seen as something important to complete the project. Why then don´t the different personality models have any impact in the selection? The organizations believe that they are already satisfied and think that the choice of simple manageable methods work well. One obstacle may be that they perceive the instep too high in the form of courses, training, purchasing models, etc., and the investment is perceived as being more costly than the estimated profit.

A follow-up question to our main research question was how the project managers perceived the need for IT support system for resource management to help the business improve and streamline their processes of allocation of resources. We have, through our literature studies looked at the importance of using a more advanced IT support system for resource management in large organizations, but in the businesses we studied, they are not used. For example, it may be that IT support can mean large economic costs, large rearrangements and extensive training for staff.

It turned out that those simpler IT support systems as MS Excel in combination with active internal communication is perceived as a sufficiently effective method of resource management particularly for the smaller businesses. Especially in these businesses, it is easier to get background information about potential project members' skills and personal qualities.