Resources are very important to deliver projects and they include types of machinery, people, technology, property and other materials that are necessary to deliver work—which can also imply the cost of resources but not automatically in financial terms. The resources may be acquired from both internal and external sources.
The project management term, Acquisition, is part of resource management and together with deployment, it is necessary to deliver the final outcome of the project. It is crucial for the owner of the project to identify the different resources that are needed to deliver work as well as the scheduling of the acquisition of the resources.
The acquisition of external resources can be done through a procurement process that involves selection of the right providers and setting of a contract to make sure that the work proceeds smoothly. Sourcing internally, on the other hand, also requires service-level agreement specifically to the departments that are required to provide a particular resource.
Acquisition is all about setting up a project management infrastructure that can mobilize the resources. This infrastructure is also necessary to create policies for the acquisition as well as the deployment of resources so that the projects will proceed as planned.
This term is defined in the 5th edition of the PMBOK.