A famous quote says,
“It’s about…. Having the right people, with the right abilities, in the right place, at the right time.”
This is exactly what resource management entails; isn’t it? Though the known objective of resource management is to allocate your resources on projects effectively, you first need to have a clear understanding of what is the scope and ask of each project. The next step is to evaluate the capabilities of the resources at hand, and then accordingly, create suitable, conflict-free plans. A business may have the best talent on board but still might be failing to hit the bull’s eye. Wonder why? Because if they are not able to allocate, schedule, and manage their people well, then they cannot meet their organizational goals. So, what is the best way to do that? Invest in resource management software, especially a cloud-based one, that can help you to efficiently manage your resources and projects.
What is a Resource Management Software?
But before proceeding further, let’s look at what is resource management software. A tool used by many industries for project management, resource planning, allocation, management, and also tracking resource utilization, productivity, or performance. Such software comes in handy to the project and resource managers in various operational activities, planning and managing schedules, staying within the budget and timeline, maintaining quality, etc. A robust resource management software is an online platform that could be used by various team members to collaborate, and communicate amongst each other, between departments, teams, and even with stakeholders.
Top Reasons to Invest in Resource Management Software
If you invest in resource management software, you can manage your resource management efficiently. Such a tool offers you insights into detailed resource data throughout your project planning and resource management phase. Let’s see how resource management software can make resource planning, management, and forecasting easy for you.
1. Balanced resource management
To deliver your projects successfully as per plan, you should be able to plan, schedule, and manage your resources efficiently. What does that mean? The project and resource managers should be careful of not overbooking a particular resource or under-utilizing them too. The first and significant step of resource management is resource planning as you can encourage better work standards at this stage. If you invest in resource management software that has the right features, then it can help you to do balanced resource management. It can identify any probable resource bottlenecks and give you insights as to when you should hire more team members and the skills they should possess, etc. You also gain clarity into the precise workload and accordingly allocate resources.
2. Ensure resource availability
Imagine if you have a critical and high-visibility project starting soon and one of your team leads or a key resource isn’t available. Maybe that resource is on a planned leave, but his previous supervisor didn’t inform you. Scheduling conflicts like this can happen in big organizations. Not only this, at times some resources may also be overbooked or overburdened on a project. If you depend on available data from an Excel sheet, then that can lead to many loopholes. But if you invest in resource management software, it can resolve various challenges you may be facing by centralizing all the data on the availability of your resources. You can just log in to this tool and check a person’s existing and future commitments, planned leave, etc. This data helps in identifying task conflicts and unavailability challenges arising during project planning.
3. Accurate pipeline forecasting
Project managers need to handle multiple projects and initiatives to be able to ensure that the business remains profitable. However, while they do this, they face issues because of a lack of visibility or clarity into how different people and projects are progressing. They also remain unsure of the resources aligned on various activities and projects. A resource management software offers a bird’s-eye view or a larger picture of what all projects or tasks are completed, the ones that are ongoing, and the ones that are planned or in the pipeline. This way, it becomes easier to prevent any likely roadblocks and save the project from getting derailed.
4. Prioritize and manage workload
At times, project managers may be surprised to see utilization data and realize that some of the resources are spending a lot of time and effort on non-billable tasks. Whereas some people could be over-booked on multiple tasks and projects but not able to deliver optimum results. In resource and project management, any of these scenarios isn’t ideal. The best is when all your resources are aligned on billable tasks. But you should be careful about not stretching them thin over excessive tasks as there is a risk of burnout, dissatisfaction, and delays. If you invest in resource management software, both the issues of underutilization and overallocation can be resolved. What’s more? You can easily get a larger picture of the commitments or booking of your resources on a daily, monthly, or quarterly basis. This enables you to find which resources are overworked or who has the bandwidth and when. Further, such a tool helps you to set your priorities and manage resource allocation efficiently by assigning your best resources to critical tasks first.
5. Resource utilization data in real-time
Another challenge that project managers usually face is tracking the productivity and resource utilization of their team members accurately. If you are able to do this, you can avoid any situations where your team is over-or under-utilized. When you invest in resource management software such as eResource Scheduler, you can assign work in a balanced manner to all the team members. Such a tool also accurately calculates resource utilization for a specific resource, your team, various teams, projects, or locations. This data helps you to create detailed reports and dashboards to showcase utilization figures to the top management. That’s not all. The utilization data is always updated in real-time, which means that whenever anyone gets free from a project, is assigned a new project, or has the bandwidth, the data will immediately change.
6. Centralized resource management
Investing in the right resource management software also offers immense clarity to an organization’s employee data. You can easily fetch data into the availability of every resource in the organization and what is their role, etc. You can feel the biggest benefit of this centralization when you do resource sharing. This is when you use different roles in various projects within the business. Mostly, the best or top resources are heavily utilized across most projects. A resource management software enables you to find who all have some free capacity and the required skill set to take up the tasks. Moreover, as this tool is your single online platform to maintain all data about your resources, like their expertise, experience, competencies, interest, etc. you can easily find suitable people for your projects.
7. Graphical overview and comprehensive reports
If you decide to invest in resource management software like Tracwire , rest assured that both project and resource management will become streamlined for you. Be it utilization data, tracking a person or team’s productivity, pulling out availability reports, and creating visual snapshots, such a tool helps you to make well-informed decisions. These dashboards help you find the productivity for a resource or your entire team along with automated skill matching. This enables to create project plans, derive the resource requirement, assign multiple tasks to a person or team, and manage overall capacity efficiently.
8. Better employee engagement and productivity
A resource management software also ensures that you avoid any over- and under-allocation. In addition, you can find the best fit for any project in a few clicks and make sure you’re not aligning over-or underqualified resources. Therefore, the project doesn’t get delayed due to skill gaps and you can also avoid cost overruns. The centralized online database assists the project managers to identify the resource for certain activities as per their skills, availability, and interests. This, in turn, has a positive impact on their performance and utilization and finally, on the profitability as well.
Allocate, Schedule, and Manage your Resources Efficiently with eResource Scheduler
Invest in resource management software to handle your resource allocation, scheduling, and a lot more with ease. Try the award-winning, cloud-based resource management tool – eResource Scheduler. This tool helps you with making project plans, precise schedules, utilization, productivity management, etc. Its best-in-class features such as a user-friendly and intuitive interface, detailed reports, time-tracking, drag, and drop functionality, etc. help you to juggle between multiple resources and projects and even when people are working remotely or in different locations. eResource Scheduler offers you real-time visibility to plan for the near future and identify additional resources that can take up short- or long-term engagements. So, achieve seamless project and resource management with eResource Scheduler. Check out the benefits of this tool by taking a free trial today.