What, according to you, is the most important asset in the services industry? Your people or your resources. The organization’s profitability, the success of your projects, and customer satisfaction all depend on how effective your scheduling and resource management is. Having said that, organizations today are facing enormous challenges such as project-based work, remote or virtual work mode, unrealistic client expectations like faster delivery with top-quality output and lower costs, etc. On top of that margins are getting squeezed due to higher competition. Thus, resource management these days is a tricky business. One of the best solutions to this problem lies in using a resource management tool. But before delving deep into that, let’s understand why the resource management lifecycle is important.
Why Is the Resource Management Lifecycle Needed?
The bottom line of any business depends on questions like what the resources at hand are? Do they have the right skills? Are they assigned the right assignments? and are the projects operating at the right margins. However, the resource management practices being used in the real world only deal with a minuscule part of the project delivery lifecycle and don’t take into consideration the perpetual change that a business goes through as it expands. The Resource Management Lifecycle tackles all such resource complexities at each milestone of the project. It also allows enough time for accommodating any change or optimization, if required.
Different Phases of the Resource Management Lifecycle
The Resource Management Lifecycle has four phases that describe the project delivery lifecycle from the beginning to the analysis. By comprehending each phase, you can optimize it better and improve the most important facets of the resource management process.
- Estimate: This is the starting point of the resource management lifecycle where you plan projects in a way that ensures success. This phase always takes place before the start of any project and is aimed to make sure that the project is recommended to a business or team. Here, you determine the resources that will be needed for the project to succeed and how can you balance your costs and revenues to ensure profitability and client satisfaction. After the requirements are communicated, the next step is to start estimating the types of roles and how many resources are required for a particular project.
Best Practices for the Estimate Phase
- Decide and establish the start of the Estimate phase
- Plan at a macro level and focus on kinds of roles and competencies
- Understand and analyse the “what ifs”
- Include the right people in the process
- Never spread across resources too thin
- Plan: At this phase of the resource management lifecycle, the project managers determine how to fulfil the resource demand and how to book resources for various projects and tasks. Now, at this stage, you are close to winning a project and you need to plan your resource availability and resource allocation at a higher level.
Best Practices for the Plan Phase - Create a database about the resource pool with key information on people’s availability, competencies, expertise, experience, cost, billing rate, etc.
- Break down your plan into small tasks and deliverables to achieve planning at a micro level
- Standardize your process for raising resource requests and approvals
- Update skills database regularly with experience levels
- Execute: This phase starts from the minute you win the project, then schedule resources, and create a project plan. The project managers start to determine and design a detailed plan for the project including the work breakdown structure, listing the sub-tasks and timelines. You also need to assign the resources at an activity level and when the project starts, you need to track the performance and timelines.
Best Practices for the Execute Phase - Conduct weekly meetings or checkpoints between resource managers who plan and the project teams
- Monitor time and track the resource utilization in real-time
- Forecast and calculate the estimates at completion and then fine-tune along the way
- Determine a list of resources as a backup
- Analyse and Optimize: As the last step of the resource management lifecycle, when the project gets completed, project and resource managers utilize the data they’ve collected throughout the project lifecycle to gauge the success, learnings, and outcome of a project and then implement techniques to streamline processes, reduce costs, further delight the clients. Mostly, this phase is ignored because of the lack of such data about the project’s success or performance. Thus, to analyse and study the success of your projects and resource plans, you should first identify how to measure a project’s success.
Best Practices for the Analyse and Optimize Phase - Design quantifiable measures or ways to gauge resource management success. For example, Billable Scheduled vs. Billable Actuals or categorise billable and nonbillable tasks
- Collect key data and important insights from every phase and compare vis-a-vis project goals
- Enhance data with actual feedback from clients or project delivery teams
- Discuss and analyse various challenges and wins in projects done
How Can a Resource Management Tool Help?
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) powered estimations
When any project is about to begin, the project manager first makes a project plan and estimates the total effort required. After that, the resources are planned and allocated. Imagine, if this calculation isn’t accurate, then your project and its schedule could derail. However, talking about real-life scenarios, when the execution phase starts, most project managers realise that their estimations aren’t very accurate. So, what’s the solution for efficient resource management? Using a tool like eResource Scheduler offers realistic and precise estimations and enables efficient resource scheduling, allocation, and resource management.
2. Plan as per demand and your team’s overall capacity
Planning and allocating your available resources in a systematic manner enables you to manage your team’s overall capacity and align with the demand. This helps in hiring the required team as per the pipeline. With a resource management tool such as eResource Scheduler, project managers can use advanced filters to identify the best team members for a particular task or project. You can also find people with the right skills, expertise, interest, experience, etc. You can also plan ahead according to the skills in demand and then determine what kind of employment contracts to offer. For instance, maybe hiring some full-time employees with a mix of contractors, freelancers, and part-timers will be a good idea. Such a tool helps in making effective resourcing decisions and also saves costs for the business.
3. Time-tracking and working with different calendars
Coordination and communication between a virtual or distributed team aren’t easy. A project manager needs to allocate tasks and coordinate with team members working in different time zones, which may be very difficult. Imagine having a tough time finding a convenient time for all resources to arrange a meeting. Or tracking each team member’s productivity or performance. However, with the right cloud-based resource management tool, you can find the current time easily for all team members, and monitor their time, utilization, and productivity. Such a tool also aids in monitoring if your remote team is using their time productively and is able to manage the assigned work.
4. Deliver high-quality projects on time
Efficient resource management always helps to complete and deliver projects on time and within the set budget. With more streamlined project and resource management, project managers get a clear picture of resource availability, and then they can do their timeline projections. A resource management tool displays a snapshot of all organization-wide resources and projects. It’s easy to assess and choose the right people from the available resources that may suit the project requirement. You can also find the task or project a specific team member is working on, and if there is some free capacity to accept any new project.
5. Gain advantages from a digital dashboard
What if you could view all the organization’s resources, ongoing projects, and booking data on one screen? Imagine having a single online repository that anyone could use to fetch any data easily and create dashboards or reports in a few clicks. That’s not all. You can also easily design customized portals and analytics with a resource management tool such as eResource Scheduler. This detailed data can help in predicting future requirements.
6. Improved and seamless collaboration and communication
With AI-enabled and cloud-based online resource management tools such as eResource Scheduler, you can communicate with your team members who may be located in any part of the world. You may have a distributed team that is spread out in multiple geographies which makes communication tough. A cloud-based resource management tool acts as a single online repository or platform that the entire team can access and use to share data, review, send files, or even organize a meeting, etc. Thus, you can connect easily with your team, various departments, and even your clients with ease.
Opt for eResource Scheduler as Your Resource Management Tool and Manage the Resource Lifecycle Perfectly
So, if you are thinking of which resource management tool to implement for optimizing your resources at each stage of the resource lifecycle, then choose eResource Scheduler. This top-rated AI-enabled software helps you to track the effort, utilization of a resource or entire team, and gain visibility on performance and productivity. If you have any questions about this tool’s features, benefits, usage, or need help to configure it, Enbraun aligns an Account Manager to help you with configuration as per your business needs. Book a free trial and breeze through the resource lifecycle phases easily.