Do you know whether your organization has enough resources to get work done? And are these resources focused on the right work? When it comes to forecasting and optimization, having the right resource management tools in place is critical to understanding utilization of resources to meet existing demands, and pursue new projects while accelerating project delivery.
Ultimately, if your organization wants to stay competitive, they will need to take a hard look at resources and how they are being aligned and allocated. For example, in a typical organization, a 5% efficiency increase for 150 resources results in approximately $858,000 or 15,600 hours of annual savings. This statistic could be reason alone to make sure your organization is using a proper resource management tool.
Let’s face it, nobody wants to let resources fall through the cracks. But do you know what to look for in a resource management tool? A resource and demand management solution should be based on three fundamental stages:
- Planning so you can prioritize and forecast your resources for maximum benefit and value
- Execution and change to help you increase responsiveness to your resource plan and prioritize changes
- Tracking and measurement to help you ensure ROI of your deployed resources; this allows you to know the actual expense of delivering business solutions
Yes, all of these stages are important in their own right. However, they each cater to different roles. For example, the executive team will be focused on resource planning while team members gravitate toward ease-of-use for tracking their tasks and time. Meanwhile, the PMO and resource managers have the toughest job—bringing everything together across the entire portfolio to manage resources through the lifecycle.
Now, you can begin to consider what are the key attributes in choosing a resource management tool. Here are some general guidelines to make sure a solution offers the following:
- The ability to recommend how to use your resource capacity to deliver the highest business value given your constraints
- What-if scenario planning to help determine if the organization can absorb and adjust to changes in the plan
- A centralized resource workbench to review, approve, and schedule resources to best position your organization for on-time and on-budget execution
- A standardized resource request workflow for project managers and resource managers to enhance communication, collaboration, and drive accountability.
- Support for time users and a user friendly mobile application for the resources to track and log time, which can make a big difference in data accuracy
Ultimately, you want to make sure you are managing well beyond just simply project or team-level tracking of resources. Instead, your goal should be to encompass all stages of the lifecycle—planning to execution to tracking the actuals across the entire project. This is where the right set of tools or solutions can play a critical role. By making sure each role is contributing to the right outcomes and that they are poised to adapt and change, you can ensure a smarter approach to resource forecasting, management, and accountability.
Resources are an organization’s most valuable assets. Are you ready to learn more? Discover how Planview PPM Pro (Formerly Planview Innotas) can help—download our whitepaper now, “Your Resources Are Falling Through the Cracks.”
