Resource Management: Best Practices Guide

Let's face it. Every organization wants to get the best out of its people. But despite their intent, even the best companies in the world struggle with productivity issues, suboptimal work output, and project delays.

Upon close inspection, we find that the problem is always  poor planning, utilization, or a lack of visibility on their available and occupied resources. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Ask any project manager to identify the source of their problems, and they're most likely to mention the same reasons.

However, being aware of our pitfalls is only one part of the puzzle. Awareness alone doesn't necessarily do much in helping us overcome our resourcing issues.  

So, how can an organization mend its ways and make better use of its available resources?

Enter resource management.  

| Simply put, resource management is the process of planning, scheduling, and allocating your company's resources in the best possible manner. It involves managing your employees' bandwidth and ensuring they work on projects that match their skill level. |

Key benefits of a resource management system

When you have a robust resource management system in place, you can:

1. Always find the right people for every project
2. Accurately plan project timelines
3. Guarantee timely delivery and reduce operating costs
4. Be more transparent with customers and improve their satisfaction levels
5. Get a realistic view of the incoming demand and your capacity to deliver
6. Understand where you're short-staffed and plan for hiring well in advance
7. Perform at your optimal best and significantly boost revenue

This blog will take you through some of the best resource management practices to help you get the most out of your team and deliver projects on time without compromising on quality.

1. Get visibility across projects and team members

Having a place where you get a bird's eye view of all your team members, their skills, the projects they're working on, and the time committed for each project can transform the way you manage your resources. This way, you can make the most of each team member and quickly identify who's available whenever demand arises.

With Rocketlane you get an overview of all your team members and their bandwidth allocation in a neatly colour-coded manner. Unlike outdated Excel sheets where you’ll have to manually keep making changes, this list gets updated automatically everytime a team member gets new work assigned to them.

2. Templatize your project plans with resource requirements

If you’ve run multiple projects of a similar size/type, you shouldn’t be scratching your head figuring out the resource requirements each time. Instead, with Rocketlane, you can create project templates that come with the project plan, timelines, role based assignment and hourly resource requirements for different roles within the template itself.

This way, every time you want to start a new project, you'll know how many people you need and for long, along with the hourly expectations for each person on the team, all in advance. This helps take the mental math and guesswork out of resource planning.

Click here to learn more about Rocketlane’s advanced templating capabilities.

3. Integrate your CRM and plan for projects proactively

By integrating your favorite CRM with Rocketlane, you can set up projects automatically when a new deal is at, say, the “verbal commitment” stage. This gives you visibility into the demand coming in from new projects well in advance.

Your sales team will usually know the size and scope of any project even before the contracts are signed. If a deal is likely to go through, your resourcing team can begin earmarking or soft assigning resources based on priority.

All these tentative soft assignments can be turned into hard blocks with a single click once the deal is won.

This kind of proactive process will help you put together the right team for each project, commit to timelines with confidence, avoid last-minute staffing, and deliver projects on time and within budget.

4. Build an A-team for every project

Now that you have your project pipeline set, a solid resource management system should enable you to put together the best possible team for every project based on availability.

For instance, on Rocketlane, you have the “Find Availability” option that helps you look for specific talent on your team with just a click. You simply specify the criteria, say a “Pre-sales engineer”, and the best matches for that role are listed based on availability. You can search for a specific set of skills this way too. Let’s say you’re looking for a React developer for a project. By looking up this skill on Rocketlane, you can identify all the available members on your team possessing this particular skill. All this ensures you put together the best possible team for any project with the resources available.

5. Always prioritize high-value projects

Having the right visibility into all your projects and resource requirements will help your resourcing teams make smarter decisions. Based on the customer type, the industry they represent and deal size, you can prioritize executing projects bringing in the highest value for your company first. The high-value projects usually deserve an earlier start date, the best team members, and maximum attention. With Rocketlane, you have all the data you need to determine the projects that bring in the highest value to your organization.

When integrated with Salesforce (or any CRM), Rocketlane can create projects with pre-built resource plans. And you have the option to tentatively allocate resources even before the paperwork formalities are completed. Based on information from project fields like ARR and customer segment, you can easily prioritise high-value projects.

6. Plan for staffing ahead of time based on data

A proactive approach to resource management also helps you plan for situations where demand exceeds supply. With the information of all the projects in the pipeline, team bandwidth, the most sought-after roles/functions readily available, you can plan for staffing well in advance, execute projects without delays, and hit your utlilization targets. This way, you have more time to find the right people and make hiring decisions, backed by solid data.

The demand screen distills this information to help you to identify the week-on-week or month-on-month demand-supply balance for various roles in their company.

If the demand for a role is running close to 100% of available capacity or going over for a sustained period of time, this is an indication that that role will become a bottleneck for smooth project delivery in the future. With this data, the organization can then consider hiring more people for that role or outsourcing some projects based on convenience.

Trust Rocketlane to take care of resource management for you

A unified project management tool like Rocketlane comes preloaded with resource management capabilities and will make life easier for everyone on your team.

It helps you ensure that the right resources are always available for high-value projects with capacity and demand management features. Rocketlane even allows you to compare planned vs. actual effort with time tracking enabled to improve your estimation and better understand where your team is spending their time.

If you're still managing your resources on spreadsheets, remember that this method involves significantly more labor and won't be feasible as you scale. Rocketlane, on the other hand, makes it super easy for you to find the right people for every project, gives you both project and people visibility, helps you measure the progress made, and speeds up project delivery. Your clients will always be in the know at every execution stage, and this kind of transparency will lead to loyal customers over time.

You don't have to take our word for it. Try Rocketlane today and see for yourself.

Click here to book a demo!