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Successful project delivery is impossible without proper management of project resources.
If a company runs multiple projects simultaneously, the importance of effective management of their shared resources increases exponentially – it helps staff every project with the right employees, ensure their productive work, and more.
What are the other benefits of effective resource management for a business organization? Let’s dive deeper into the issue.
What is resource management, and how does it work?
As stated in the Project Management Body of Knowledge, project resource management is the process of identifying, acquiring, and managing resources required to complete a project successfully.
To achieve maximum efficiency of the resource management process, companies can adopt resource management solutions, for example, Epicflow which is the tool that helps effectively manage multiple concurrent projects and their shared resources. We’ll review the business benefits it can provide later in the article.
Let’s now review the most fundamental resource management activities that help ensure that the right people work on the right tasks at the right time.
Resource capacity planning
It helps determine the number of employees required to staff current and upcoming projects, which is especially important for project-based organizations with a limited number of resources. Capacity planning involves the analysis of current and future project needs, available capacity, determining the gap between them (if there's any), and bridging it. Resource capacity planning makes it possible to prevent:
- unexpected resource shortages;
- overwork and idleness;
- project delays caused by resource unavailability;
- cost overrun caused by last-minute hiring and/or delays.
Resource allocation
Resource allocation is a basic resource management activity that involves assigning team members to project tasks in accordance with their competences, availability, and capacity.
Proper resource allocation is the basis for efficient resource utilization; it contributes to balancing employees’ workload and increasing their productivity – when they aren’t overworked and stressed and perform the tasks that match their competence levels, they are much more efficient.
Workload management
Workload management aims to ensure that team members’ workload corresponds to
their availability and capacity. In such a way, you can prevent employees from overwork and idleness, both of which reduce their productivity. Overwork leads to stress and increases the probability of making mistakes that require rework; such an employee can easily become a bottleneck for the workflow. Idle employees are those who aren’t working at their available capacity. In both cases, overall productivity is reduced. In contrast, effective workload management aims to balance team members’ workload to make them productive and engaged.
Resource optimization techniques
When you cannot distribute workload evenly, or a critical employee is needed for several projects/tasks at the same time, you should apply resource optimization techniques – resource leveling and resource smoothing.
Resource leveling helps bridge the resource demand with the available supply when it’s impossible to complete the required scope of work without overallocating employees. In most cases this technique requires adjusting the project timeline.
While resource leveling is applied to relieve the resource constraint, resource smoothing works for the time constraint – i.e., when the project timeline cannot be changed. You should apply it to adjust uneven distribution of resources and balance the resource demand.
What are the benefits of effective resource management?
Let’s now examine how companies benefit from effective resource management.
More efficient utilization of available resources
Effective resource management is meant to find the balance between increasing employees’ efficiency and preventing their overutilization: to distribute tasks between employees in such a way that they are capable of completing them timely and efficiently in accordance with their capacity.
Balancing employees’ workload
Efficient resource management implies that employees are allocated to project tasks in such a way that they are neither overloaded nor idle. Both phenomena negatively affect the team members’ productivity and the whole workflow.
Increasing team members’ productivity
When people have a balanced workload (neither overloaded, nor idle) and work on the tasks that correspond to their competences, they are productive and engaged. They are less prone to making mistakes, and there will be less probability for delivery delays.
Project cost optimization
Employees’ productive work on project tasks minimizes delays which result in exceeding the budget. Also, in a number of cases, effective resource management can reduce costs. Thanks to the right distribution of resources between tasks, there can be no more demand for hiring additional resources.
Improved project delivery
When all resources involved in a project work like an orchestra, where everybody is aware of their particular role in the whole process and navigates towards a common goal, the probability of successful project completion is much higher.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, you can increase the effectiveness of the resource management process with the right software. Let’s examine how business organizations can benefit from it.
Why does your company need resource management software?
Resource management software helps plan, allocate, and manage project resources so that they are utilized with maximum efficiency. Its capabilities vary from more simple resource planning and scheduling to making predictions, identifying bottlenecks, performing scenario analysis, etc. Some of the solutions, like the above-mentioned Epicflow, can meet both project and resource management needs, being an all-in-one system for managing all project-related processes.
Utilizing resource management software can provide organizations with benefits on multiple levels: from boosting the efficiency of project work to increasing a company's profitability and competitiveness. Here are some of the business benefits of utilizing a resource management solution.
It facilitates effective managementof projects and their shared resources
Seamless and fruitful work on projects will increase the quality of project deliverables, prevent project delays and cost overrun. As a result, companies can maintain their competitiveness in the market. Effective resource management optimizes resource utilization so that a company can complete more projects with the same number of resources.
It helps improve operational efficiency
A resource management tool can improve an organization’s operational efficiency thanks to:
- automating some project and resource management processes;
- brining distributed teams together, reducing silos, and ensuring fruitful collaboration;
- providing opportunities for assessing workflow efficiency, bottleneck detection, and identifying areas for improvement;
- ensuring that the right team member works on the right project task at the right time.
It provides the opportunity to deliver more projects
As a result of the optimized resource management, companies get an opportunity to deliver more projects with the same number of resources. This becomes possible thanks to:
- Setting the right priorities;
- Ensuring balanced workload and productivity;
- Preventing bottlenecks.
It facilitates making informed decisions
If a resource management solution is capable of scenario analysis, it can show you the consequences of decisions you make. Having analyzed all possible options, you can make the most reasonable decision. For example, you can test the feasibility of a new project (whether the team will cope with additional load) or find the most appropriate way to resolve a bottleneck.
It optimizes project costs
Implementation of a resource management solution can optimize costs in the following ways:
- By increasing team members’ productivity;
- By eliminating bottlenecks in the workflow;
- By optimizing resource utilization;
- By making the right management decisions;
- By improving operational efficiency.
All of the above-mentioned business benefits can be achieved upon implementing Epicflow.
Therefore, effective resource management, especially when assisted by the right resource management software, contributes to seamless and efficient workflow, delivering high-quality output, cost optimization, increasing an organization’s business performance as well as gives business organizations a competitive advantage.