Resource Allocation is making that grand plan on how to rally your troops behind a common goal. It is about strategic planning to identify the skills required, the number of resources required for those specific skills at what intervals and for how long.
Simply put, it is end to end resource management allowing you to assess your resources’ availability and putting them to good use.
As Wikipedia says,
In project management, resource allocation or resource management is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time.
In strategic planning, resource allocation is a plan for using available resources, for example human resources, especially in the near term, to achieve goals for the future. It is the process of allocating scarce resources among the various projects or business units.
Resources are crucial to an organization’s strategy and vision and managing them well goes a long way in achieving that vision.
Successful companies are always focused on achieving high customer engagement & satisfaction, technologically advanced products & services and increased profitability.And resource management sits right at the core of these 3 priorities with human resource management being the key focus point.Numerous resource management challenges lead companies to deploy integrated project and resource management system for holistic execution.Project and resource managers’ #1 challenge is to ensure resource productivity and timely project delivery.Having the right resources assigned to the project based on skills is most important.
Each project manager would want a lion’s share of the best resources for his project.This leads to allocation conflicts and becomes more territorial with inter-department issues if the organization doesn’t have a robust matrix culture.Resource managers have a tough time addressing project manager needs across business functions.Hence, it is important that resource allocation is done based on project priority.
Which project will fetch the maximum $$ or lead to a significant rise in market share, customer satisfaction or brand building.Integrated project and resource management will help to iron out such issues proactively and ensure efficient resource allocation across the organization.
And, the universal challenge is we all hate tracking our time.
And the second one being billable vs non-billable hours.These 2 metrics help identify our resource productivity and project profitability.Also, as project managers you know how your resources are performing w.r.t the project schedule.Most project and resource management systems offer non-intrusive time tracking capabilities with automated timers, time entries, timesheets and approvals for improved time management.Tracking spent hours also helps us to see how well are we aligned with the delivery deadlines as well as where are we spending most of our time.Identifying and reducing time spent on non-billable activities is a must practice to improve our processes, increase resource productivity and scale our operations.
Task Categorization and TrackingThere are going to be 100s of activities within a project.