Anyone familiar with resource management knows it involves a LOT of moving parts. And when there’s a lot of moving parts, it’s easier for things to slip through the cracks—important, expensive things, like under- or over-utilized employees, inaccurate project timelines, false starts or slow beginnings, or kicking off a project with a less than ideal team. Because of this, TaskRay has been hard at work creating the kinds of resource management features YOU want to see to make this part of your job easier. Let’s dive into what each does and how they all work together seamlessly to streamline repeatable processes, build out strong, make capacity planning a whole lot less stressful, and optimize your resources through analytics and forecasting.
This is where you’ll head to quickly get up and running with resource management. From here you can configure placeholder Roles, define Resources, assign Resource Attributes, and access the Dynamic Team Builder, as well as configure business schedules and holidays. Configuration Hub also puts a searchable resource database at your fingertips, which can be particularly beneficial for larger organizations.
Why it matters: This feature supports lots of roles, including project managers, template managers, onboarding teams, and admins by allowing them to spend less time bogged down in the configuration quagmire. It also ensures streamlined project launches that follow best practices, ensuring happier customers by driving faster time-to-revenue.
When it comes time to build a team—or to switch up the players mid-project—Dynamic Team Builder provides all the support you need. It shows you all your available resources and makes reassignment a breeze. From here, you can also fine-tune individual project access for effective collaboration. Premium Edition users, who can add Resource Attributes, can utilize a criteria-driven search bar to quickly surface Resources based on skills or other characteristics.
Why it matters: Dynamic Team Builder paves the way for better project visibility, easy collaboration, and happier customers. When projects begin quickly and effectively, your clients see a return on their investment that much faster. Dynamic Team Builder also provides the flexibility you need to easily swap out team members or reassign work within projects already in motion.
Resource Attributes allows you to dive into the nitty gritty of your team and build on the power of the Dynamic Team Builder. This is where you assign all the skills, certifications, and other important info to individual Resources or Roles so you can quickly build your project starting lineups. Attributes can include certifications, software and other tech proficiencies, skills, languages, locations, interests—or whatever else you decide is relevant to your business processes and goals. You can even search attributes to see how many team members meet the qualifications you’re looking for.
Why it matters:Resource Attributes elevates your team building experience by putting all this important criteria in one place. Gone are the days of tracking this stuff in spreadsheets or other disparate tools, which saves not just time and money, but also the sanity of your project managers. You’ll confidently assemble the right team for the job the first time around–and easily reassign work when you hit those inevitable project snags.
Resource Planner provides a central location for all your capacity planning needs, making this overwhelming task a much more streamlined effort that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. View your entire team or filter by Resource or Role, see workload at the project or task level, and visualize it by day, week, or month. Red highlighting alerts you when anyone’s capacity exceeds 100 percent, and you need only click a Resource to easily reassign work and see how those proposed changes impact the project before making them live.
Why it matters: This tool empowers you to maximize your resources through informed headcount decisions using accurate capacity data, helps you proactively plan for the future, and easily troubleshoot when capacity issues arise. It ensures that no one is under- or over-utilized, helps prevent employee burnout and turnover, reduces false starts, and facilitates strong decision-making when building out teams, assigning work, and creating project timelines.
You shouldn’t have to be an expert to benefit from insights into your resource usage, and Resource Analytics is a zero-effort solution to help you make the most of your team. It’s an out-of-the-box analytics dashboard that uses various charts to help you quickly identify problems and areas for improvement when it comes to your resource utilization. Filter by overall Utilization as well as Utilization by Month, Role, Role per Month, Attribute, and Resource to identify trends, see where you need to build out your team, and how overutilization of one team impacts others.
Why it matters: Resource Analytics helps solve for top-level resource management needs and is designed with beginners in mind–but has the flexibility for advanced use cases. Insights help organizations become proactive by uncovering patterns and trends in resource utilization for strategic planning to improve long-term resource management. Plus, it reduces admin burden through out-of-the-box reporting and no need for ongoing maintenance.
Resource Forecasting builds on the powers of Resource Analytics by giving Premium Edition customers the foresight to anticipate future workloads based on your sales pipeline. Forecasting allows you to plan for potential future work based on your sales pipeline with out-of-the-box flows for creating forecast projects.
Why it matters: Resource Forecasting allows you to easily–and effortlessly–anticipate potential future resource needs so you can identify potential issues and take preemptive action. With this insight, you can strategically allocate resources, swiftly adapt to changing demands, and tackle potential issues before they escalate.
We know this suite of resource management features will be everything you need, and we can’t wait for you to see how it all functions together and transforms the way you do business. If you want to dive deeper into our latest release (April 2024), check out the blog post here.
If you still have questions about TaskRay’s Resource Management tools, please contact CSM or email support@taskray.com for further assistance. We’re here to help!
