Learn more about resource management and its benefits.

Smart resource management requires smart tools. farmerswife intelligently distributes and assigns work to teams, groups, or individuals based on availability and skill requirements, ensuring that the right people are doing the right work. In this blog we will explain what resource management is and why it's important to use a smart resource management software to help your organization become more efficient and effective.

What is resource management?

Resource management definition is the combined effort of managing and assigning your organization’s resources like team members, budgets, and capacity. The purpose of resource management is to plan, allocate and schedule an organization’s resources as efficiently as possible. To get a better understanding of the definition of resource management, let’s look at a few other key terms.

The Basics of Resource Management

Resource management plays a significant role in improving a business’s profitability and sustainability. Successful resource management depends on three main capabilities:

• Insights
  Granular insights into what people are working on and how long each task takes.
• Priorities
  Clearly articulated priorities and project expectations shared across the organization.
• Tracking
  Real-time tracking and status updates throughout the entire project life-cycle.

Why Is Resource Management Important?

Planning and scheduling

From a high level, resource planning is the step in the project outline where you identify all of the resources that will be necessary to complete a given project. You aren’t assigning specific tasks to anyone, or allocating budget, just laying the foundation for what you expect.

You want to look at a few “what if” scenarios to make sure you know how other priorities and timelines are impacted. Resource planning helps you avoid blown budgets, missed opportunities, and miscommunication across tasks and teams.

During the scheduling phase, you compare resource needs against resource availability, this will be better managed with a scheduling software, which will allow you to look back at the forecasted resources (time, budget, and skills) and determine where they overlap with your team’s current workload.

Available and required skills

Use the information about availability to make assignments based on team members’ abilities. It’s important to remember that different people have different skills. Scheduling tasks based on individual strengths helps improve project turnaround rates. Plus, when people are doing work that they’re good at, they’re usually happier and more engaged.

Resource utilization

With resource utilization managers will be able to understand how their team members are spending their time, this will allow them to make more efficient resourcing decisions which will maximise productivity and profitability. Effective resource utilization is crucial to maintaining the iron triangle project management's balance of scope, cost, and time.

Benefits of resource management

Maximize Your Team’s Efficiency
Effectively harnessing the power of your people through streamlined resource management has the potential to save you time, energy, and money. With accurate information about resource availability, you’re able to accurately scope, prioritize, and project time tracking.

The right resource management tools allow you to:

• See who is working on what
• Make real-time adjustments
• Know when projects are at risk
• Respond quickly to shifting priorities
• Take advantage of last-minute opportunities
• Equipment management and tracking

Improve Team Morale
Increased project efficiency does more than improve your bottom line, it also boosts morale. When your team is constantly met with roadblocks and impossible workloads, their job satisfaction plummets and productivity goes down. That’s why accurate planning and forecasting tools are so critical—no one ends up with too much work and everyone feels valued.

Deliver Reports & Insights
To remain competitive and prove your team’s value, you need to be able to quickly analyze performance and make improvements. By integrating scheduling and rate card functionalities in the same database, all your project’s financial data will automatically update when budgets and quotes are created or amended and resources scheduled. 

You’ll never be able to streamline processes if you don’t have accurate information about your projects and resources. Keep executives in the loop and make sure you’re able to demonstrate your successes or make corrections where projects might be going off-track. 

Resource Management Technique

Let's have a look at the four resource management techniques:

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation is the process of assigning and scheduling available resources in the most effective and economical way possible throughout a project to ensure that it runs as smoothly and successfully as possible.

Resource Utilization

Resource utilization is defined as the "time spent working", it measures the utilization of your available resources. It’s the simplest means of measuring utilization and a general business metric to keep track of the daily productivity of your employees. 

Resource Leveling

Resource leveling will generally aim to distribute work between resources fairly, which not only contributes to a healthy work environment, but also makes the project schedule realistic and achievable. Resources include the time, materials, or tools needed to complete a project.

Resource Forecasting

Resource forecasting is the process of anticipating your organization's resource needs over a future period of time. This enables expectations to be managed for existing and future projects. A resource forecast will help ensure that your resources are proportional to the workload. 

Conclusion

A project management software such as farmerswife brings together all aspects of work so your team can complete their work faster than ever. Smart project resource management planning, scheduling, and capacity tools to make sure your people are working on the right projects, at the right time and in the right place. 

What are you waiting for?