The project manager, in this case, usually approaches those "helpful" colleagues to negotiate/beg for higher portion of participation/dedication to his/her projects. Those helpful colleagues, based on their goodwill (not capability), usually provide positive feedback to the project manager like "no problem, I will try my best to help". In fact, those people are just "nice demons" doing something harmful to the project.
Such positive but no commitment feedback such as "try my best" only posts a false hope to the project manager. Unless those people can commit a measurable input/effort to the project, there is no true commitment and the project is usually doomed to failure because of lack of dedicated resources. The project manager will finally suffer from those helpful and nice "demons".
In reality, resource is limited and there is no superman in the world. If any colleague (resource) can doubtlessly spare his/her substantial effort/time to provide additional assistance to others without hesitation (evaluation), I will first question his/her capability (see my previous article about "the busiest people") instead of simply believing the uncommitted commitment.
In such situation, responsible colleagues should first evaluate the situation (the scope of request, the capability, the resources....) before making any commitment. If they realize that they are not able to help, they should turn down the requests politely and I call them "nice angels". (How to say "No" nicely is another topic; there are lot of books about self-improvement teaching how to say "No". To name one is the classic from Dale Carnegie - "How to Win Friends & Influence People"). I summarize my view about "Angels & Demons" in the following matrix:
Angel & Demon Matrix (by Gavin Lam, 2007)
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