Top 10 Effective Resource Planning and Management Ideas

In today’s times, organizations are facing growing pressure to deliver innovative and good-quality products and services in limited budgets. How is that possible? Firstly, it is vital that your resources are optimally utilized and are aware of their priorities. Unfortunately, many project managers rely on disjointed reports or inaccurate data regarding the available talent or people. There is hardly any visibility into the performance metrics of all available resources and their competencies and experience. But if you want your projects to succeed, it’s important to be thorough with resource planning and manage your people well. Effective resource management will enable your company to garner profit and your resources too would be motivated towards achieving more. Thus, a well-thought-out resource planning and management strategy is imperative to ensure that you get the most out of your people and drive your projects to success.

So, here are some resource management ideas and tips to create and implement a robust resource management strategy.

10 Resource Management Ideas and Best Practices

1. Focus on the resources that are in short supply: 
   
   There’s no rocket science here. You just need to apply the 80/20 rule, according to which 80% of the resource limitations occur because of the 20% of the resources. These 20% top resources are basically the employees who are always in high demand for different projects. So, focusing on this 20% of people will make a huge difference. You need to plan their time, projects, and availability in a manner that you can derive the best out of them while ensuring no timelines are missed.

2. Create a robust knowledge base and organization-wide resource pool: 
   
   To be able to do effective resource planning and allocation, you need visibility of the skills each employee has and their availability. For this, a project or resource manager would require access to a data repository that shows the availability, skillset, constraints, and location of all the people in your organization. But there’s no one report or data that can help you find all this. This is resolved by using the right resource management tool. A resource management software like eResource Scheduler provides you a list of all running projects and resources in your organization. What’s more? Using its advanced filters, you can find the best people as per the competency, experience, or qualification you need. Check their availability, billing details, and utilization rate in just a few clicks, and resource planning and management becomes very simple for you.

3. Clear project communication: 
   
   It is important that all the information, status, and decisions about a project are passed down to each team member. Thus, it is important to maintain transparency in the overall communication process. It’s important for all the team members to have access to all the important project-related information so that everyone’s opinions can be taken while making any decisions.

4. Forecast the future and plan accordingly: 
   
   When doing resource planning, it is important to predict the resource requirements in the near future and then plan accordingly. Consider all the existing projects and the ones in the pipeline. This way, you can get ready for any upcoming challenges or tough situations in advance, and you’ll be better equipped to overcome these hurdles.

5. Form a risk management team: 
   
   At times, even when your planning and resource management is thorough, there could be deviations or slippages at some stage. For example, some unexpected challenges could crop up – the client changes the project scope, or your best resource goes on a sudden leave, etc. How can you predict or track such challenges? The best way is to create a risk management team and let them tackle this for you. The best fit for this role would be people who are experienced in this field and can examine and control the possible risks that could arise in the project lifecycle.

6. Collaboration enhances productivity: 
   
   Another resource management idea is to look for ways to increase productivity. Improving the collaboration among your team helps in a big way. Using a resource planning and management tool allows your team to easily collaborate and share data with each other in just a few clicks. It’s important to not work in silos and for every department and employee to feel a part of one team. Using such software ensures that your team members get real-time updates, feedback, and can share their ideas freely.

7. Accurate time reporting for smooth resource management: 
   
   Recording login or log out time or filling timesheets manually can be cumbersome; isn’t it? But it’s important to report time accurately for seamless resource management. As a project manager, you need this data to calculate the utilization rate for each employee and your team overall. So, what can be done? You can use a  resource management tool where your team can clock in their time and effort. This will automate the time reporting process and whenever you need to pull out availability and utilization reports, you can do so in just a few clicks.
   
   
8. Adopt multiple ways of operating across the team and organization: 
   
   When it comes to project and resource management, one strategy doesn’t fit all. Some projects or resources within a company could benefit from a particular approach. But that might not work in all scenarios. Thus, it’s important to ensure that the approaches you choose are aligned with your overall plan and succeed in generating efficiencies. However, at a macro level, you can apply a standardized approach for getting the metrics required for a larger view of your organization. This will enable you to plan, execute, and deliver projects successfully by using multiple styles like traditional, Agile, collaborative, milestone-driven, or iterative.
   
   
9. Optimize your resource utilization: 
   
   Another important resource management idea is that you should do resource planning in such a way that it optimizes your resource utilization. Whether it is time, effort, money, or human resources, using your resources to the optimal is the key to success. Here, resource management software comes in handy as it helps you in managing various resources in the best possible manner. As a result, you and your team will be able to complete more projects within the budget and timelines.

10. Go for a good resource planning and management tool: 
    
    Using the right resource management software provides you easy access to all the running projects and a list of all available resources so that you can allocate them efficiently. eResource Scheduler is an advanced tool that has an intuitive interface and is highly configurable. It offers brilliant features like drag and drop planning, comprehensive dashboards, and utilization and availability reports for better decision-making. The tool eases the life of project managers by automating a lot of processes and reducing the scope of errors.

eResource Scheduler – Your Best Bet for Resource Planning and Management

Designed with the primary goal of offering a powerful yet cost-effective resource management tool, this flagship system by Enbraun is available in both cloud-based and on-premise versions. This collaborative software is used by various global organizations to effectively plan, profile, schedule, and manage their resources. eResource Scheduler helps in increasing your resource utilization and assuring project success. You can maintain a comprehensive database of both your human and other resources by utilizing custom-defined fields and forms. Want to schedule your resources on one or more projects? It’s simple – just use the drag n drop functionality and update all your users and their availability on the resource schedules in real-time. There are many more benefits that this tool offers. So, don’t wait any longer, and sign up for its free trial now!