Resource Allocation
The assignment of people time budget or infrastructure capacity across competing work.
Plain English
Decide where limited resources should be used.
In context
Resource allocation turns priorities into actual capacity commitments and should expose tradeoffs dependencies and opportunity cost.
Example
“The quarterly plan allocates one engineer to reliability work before feature expansion.”
When you'll hear this
- portfolio planning
- staffing
- budgeting
Common misunderstanding
Allocating a person does not guarantee availability when existing workload skills and interruptions are ignored.
Also known as
capacity allocationresource planning
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-27
