Delivering quality work while staying on-budget and on-schedule is the pinnacle achievement for any business. But dreams of successful outcomes don’t become reality without proper planning and strategy—the ins and outs of which can sometimes seem murky. Fortunately, there is a set of techniques—known as resource management—that ensure smooth project launches and deliveries by helping you maximize your available resources—like talent, time, tech, and budget—as well as mitigate risk. Let’s dive into some of those techniques as well as the ways in which your business will benefit from effective resource management.
Common resource management techniques include, but aren’t limited to:
- Resource allocation, which helps you understand your project needs and assign the best resources for the job based on their skills, certifications, and interests
- Resource utilization, which ensures no one person is over or underworked
- Resource scheduling, which aligns talent availability to project tasks based on deadlines
- Resource leveling, which allows you to adjust timelines and budgets based on your best available resources, as well as transfer tasks when one or more resources is overutilized
While there may seem to be a lot to consider, the right tools can help streamline the resource management process, allowing you to reap some major benefits.
Effective resource management…
- Ensures greater project success. When every project is appropriately staffed, scheduled, and budgeted for, they’re much more likely to meet standards of quality and be completed on-time and on-budget. That means improved time-to-value for your customers—leading to higher satisfaction rates, less churn, and increased profitability.
- Improves employee morale and avoids costly burnout. Maximizing your team is not just about project success; it’s also about employee satisfaction. Resource management ensures you hit the “Goldilocks” target of utilization, meaning no one person is under or overworked. Balanced workloads mean increased productivity, higher-quality work, and better retention rates.
- Aids data-driven hiring decisions. Resource management provides insight into exactly who you have, what their skills are, and when they’re available—meaning you can effectively pinpoint any gaps and make informed hiring requests to leadership.
- Encourages proactive capacity planning and decisive action. It’s not solely about optimizing resources for ongoing projects; it’s also about preparing for upcoming ones. By obtaining a clear view of available resources, you can align with talent availability, facilitating smoother project execution.
- Provides transparency. Effective resource management also helps streamline project launches by giving you a clear picture of what worked and what didn’t. When you can repeat variables from past successful projects—like number of staff or a specific budget—you’re more likely to see that success again. You can also pinpoint where anything went awry—meaning you can avoid those pitfalls in the future.
With a better understanding of what resource management is and what it can do for you, it’s easy to see why it’s such an integral part of any successful business. If you want to know how TaskRay streamlines this process, check out the Resource Management feature page—or dive into the details in our next blog post.
