Abstract: An interactive voice response system (IVR) is described for processing multiple voice application instances, said system comprising: at least one resource such as a speech synthesizer or speech recognition engine; one voice application using said at least one resource; telephony software for determining that at least two instances of the same voice application will use said at least one resource simultaneously; and further telephony software for forcing the instances of the voice applications to be delayed with respect to each other whereby the risk of IVR overloading the at least one resource is reduced. The delay is forced in an active step in a voice application such as answering the application or playing a prompt in the application only if it is determined that future resource utilization (FRM) is above resource utilization capacity (RUC).