How about we accept that you are deserted on an island. What three things would you need with you?
Got your things? great! — you just did resource management. You have an objective (to get through), and you should come to a decision on how to achieve that objective with hardly any resources.
In businesses, resource management is complex and not easy. Resources are the biggest cost for any business and therefore, clarity into the capacity and capability of resources is important. By building up a fair strategy for resource management planning, you are enhancing profitability and improving the usage of those resources.
What is resource management?
So what are resource management skills? Resource management is a method of planning, resource scheduling and resource allocation to amplify efficiency of your team and bring continuity to projects. Resources are continuously involved to carry out project tasks with a desired skill sets and tools. For example, an IT project could have resources like project stakeholders, IT infrastructure or software, project management software to name a few. Hope this clarifies the resource management meaning and its importance.
Why is effective resource management important?
Resource management in project management is about completing all the tasks without wasting the allocated time. Let’s accept the fact that nobody likes to waste resources, especially in business.
Resource management techniques will help you to deliver your project as per time and effort estimations. Resource management revolves around improving the proficiency of the resources. At the point when you understand what you need to make a task fruitful, you can successfully plan how to allocate resources in an effective manner.
In enterprises where the complexity of projects is higher, the resource management function is handled by a specialist role known as a resource manager.
What does a resource manager do?
While project directors are liable for making and relegating undertakings to complete the project, resource managers are responsible for allotting the right resources required to make the project successful.
What are the advantages of resource management?
- Helps to anticipate unexpected hiccups: By understanding your resources forthright and planning how to utilize them, you can investigate gaps or issues before they occur.
- Saves resource burnout: Resource management allows you to avoid the “overallocation” of resources by providing insight into your team’s allocated work at an individual resource level as well as at an organization level.
- Gives a safety net: Let’s say the project was not fruitful because of the absence of resources (it occurs). Resource planning and project management together solidify processes that are required to successfully complete the end of the project to end.
- Assembles transparency: Other teams can have visibility into your team’s bandwidth and plan in a manner such that your team can deliver current work and take up future work.
- Measures effectiveness: With a high resolution view of resources and their work, execution of every project becomes effective and this delivers a measurable return on investment.
What are the widely used resource management techniques?
Now that you understand what resource management is, let’s discuss how you can implement it across your projects(Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid.)
Resource Allocation
Resource allocation provides a clear organization wide picture of projects and allocated resources thereby helping project managers to exactly know the available capacity in the organization.
To get an overview of resource allocation, project managers will frequently look at resource allocation reports. These can give a bird’s eye view to a summary of resource availability — assisting you with minifying delays and going over the budget allocated to the project. The better the report the more clarity and efficiency you will have over your activities.
Resource Leveling
This is another technique in resource management. This technique will help you identify the skill availability within your organization and then use those skills to your advantage.
For example – having a developer with testing experience, who can contribute to the project by doing small testing tasks for your software development project.
Resource Forecasting
Having a resource management plan is basic to optimizing individuals, materials, and spending capacity. Resource forecasting permits you to foresee your future resource demands before a project starts. During the project planning phases, you could consider resource management software that helps you in resource allocation, project’s scope, possible issues, unexpected expenses, and risks.
To make these data driven predictions, project managers must have deep knowledge of the project lifecycle and set objectives. This can be easily achieved if the project manager knows the exact availability of the skilled workforce within the organization.
Resource management is an art and one must empower the artist, the ‘resource manager’ with real time data to make the best team available for every single project.
About Whizible –
Whizible provides this level of visibility because of its integrated nature – Forecasting resource demand, tracking their project wise utilization, linking it with project planning, automatic issue assignment, amongst others.
