In today’s times, businesses face immense pressure to deliver ground-breaking products and services that should be cost-effective as well. For achieving this goal, you need to utilize your resources optimally while prioritizing well. By resources, we mean assets such as equipment, facility, material, and most importantly, people. If resource management is not optimal or ineffective, it leads to low productivity, schedule misses, low-quality deliveries, and increased costs. So, how can you improve resource management? How can you ensure that your team delivers all the projects successfully – that is on time and within the decided budget? Using resource management software can help you attain this complex-sounding goal. Not only that, using such a tool has many benefits. But first, let’s see what is meant by resource management.
Defining Resource Management
The process of managing the available resources efficiently to get the optimum value out of them is called resource management. To do effective resource management, you need to centralize all the data from different sources in one repository and ensure a single version of the truth. Implementing resource management software is the best solution. However, you must make sure that the tool can handle resource planning, scheduling, allocation, forecasting, and capacity planning. Look for a tool that can manage business intelligence and report too, and finally, it should be able to integrate with other applications.
Why is Resource Management Crucial for a Business?
1. Optimizing Resource Efficiency – Resource Utilization
Resource utilization means making the most out of the available resources. Utilization is the percentage of a person’s busy time within a specific period. The formula for resource utilization is busy time / available time. This is a vital metric to gauge if your resources are working at their best or maximum efficiency or now. This also gives you an insight into resource availability and then you can find the best fitting match for a specific task or project. Both under- and over-booking your resources result in negative outcomes. Maintaining a good utilization number means your team is happy and is not over-burdened. Resources are being used to their utmost potential, which is keeping your project deliverables on time and within budget.
2. Plan your Capacity According to the Probable Demand
Scientific and systematic resource management helps in doing capacity planning. This process lets you hire a workforce that matches perfectly with the demand you have right now and in the near future. Besides, enabling you to plan with regards to competencies you require, it also provides you with the insights needed to plan availability. You can also determine the kind of employment contracts you can provide. For instance, rather than hiring all full-time employees, you can also hire some part-timers, or freelancers, or contractors with the skill set you need. As you can make well-informed hiring decisions in advance, you end up saving additional costs, and your project deadlines and quality are not compromised.
3. Deliver Projects on Schedule
Efficiently managing your resources helps in delivering more consistent projects and services within the timelines and budget. Better resource management helps you to gain an insight into resource availability while improving your timeline projections. If you use the right resource management software, it helps the project managers to get a clearer view of all the resources and projects in the organization. You can track which resources are available, what is each team member assigned, and if they can take out time to be aligned to a new project. Having a 360-degree view also helps project managers to see the bigger picture and calculate how much time is needed for projects. This further helps to better your time projections and plan resources tactically for successful delivery.
4. Precise Estimates
Isn’t it difficult to calculate the effort and timelines for a new project as so many things are uncertain? This is another reason why resource management is so critical. When the resource management process is followed, project managers can easily create more precise estimates. They can list which resources will be required to complete a task or project and what will be the associated costs. This enables the project managers to calculate project costs and margins more accurately. A resource management software also offers a record of historical data from earlier projects and resource plans to make well-informed budgets for newer projects.
5. Time the Team’s Performance and Success
Tracking your team’s daily performance regularly helps in understanding the capacity of each team member. You will know which resource is able to meet the timelines and who is struggling to keep up with the schedule. Implementing resource management software also helps to monitor if a task is taking more than the calculated time. In that case, you can distribute those tasks and get them done faster. If you are anxious about missed timelines, then resource management software with time-tracking capabilities can help you stay updated about the project progress and status. Accessibility to the time-tracking data can help you plan and schedule upcoming tasks seamlessly.
6. Better Employee Satisfaction
A resource that is over-burdened or over-utilized may be constantly behind the project schedule. Because of multi-tasking, the employee may feel overwhelmed or even dissatisfied with his or her job. This is another reason why resource management is very important. A resource management software measures the amount of work a resource has been assigned. This also helps the project managers to come up with more tactical decisions about who is the best person to include on new projects and what is the right time to do so. This enables in avoiding work overload or burn-out and it further helps in enhancing employee morale and job satisfaction.
7. Transparency and Better Communication
Maintaining transparency in project work is crucial to foster trust within the teams. Resource management tools boost healthy relations among resources and their managers, between various teams and departments, and between multiple project managers. When a project manager has an insight into resource availability and what is the planned workload, then he will not make any faulty decisions. Because of that, double-booking can be avoided. You can also save time on unnecessary email trails and handle the communication seamlessly through the resource management software. For instance, if you add a specific resource to your project, you don’t have to inform other PMs or teams about it. The resource management software would allow you to add that person as a tentative booking and other project managers can see that this person might be joining your team.
8. Increase Profitability
Another mantra for a project’s success is that the quote for a project should consider estimated costs to decide the anticipated profits. Efficient resource management helps to enhance the profitability of a business by better predicting and optimizing various project costs. Mostly, the human resource costs go up to almost 70% or more of the total project costs. Thus, we can say that the profitability of a project or business largely depends on if the project is completed on time and by the allocated resources only or not. A resource management software provides detailed information about how various resources are being utilized, how they are performing, and what is their cost vis-à-vis the budgeting. This tool also offers information about which team members are performing well, who need to improve, and what are the predictable project areas that may need additional, or lesser resources in the future.
Opt for the Right Resource Management Software – eResource Scheduler
If you want your projects to hit the bull’s eye, then pick the right resource management software. Look for a tool that enables your team, managers, and stakeholders to monitor the status, productivity, scheduling process, and lots more. Enbraun’s flagship product, eResource Scheduler, completely streamlines your resource management process. By using this award-winning tool, you can plan your resources on various projects, create dashboards and detailed reports, monitor utilization, and keep tracking the profitability of the project. This Cloud-based tool comes with brilliant features like an intuitive design, easy-to-use interface, and high configurability. So, optimize your resources to the fullest by using eResource Scheduler. Book a free trial today to check out this tool’s benefits.
Company Bio: ENBRAUN is a software product and service company. eResource Scheduler is its Flagship software product.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eresourcescheduler
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ers_enbraun
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/enbraun