Effective Resource Management – What is it and Top 10 Tips to achieve it?
People are the most important resource when it comes to project management. As it is said, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” For any project to succeed, it’s imperative that you manage your resources efficiently. Doing that will ensure that you garner profits due to resource optimization and lesser bench time. Additionally, effective resource management generates an overall positive attitude and motivation in your team.
What is Effective Resource Management?
For effective resource management, you need a clear understanding of your objectives and what’s the available capacity. It also requires an insight into the resource pool’s skills, working style, and the future project pipeline. To define it, resource management is the process where you plan, schedule, and allocate your resources to maximize efficiency. A resource could mean a person or anything that is required to implement a task or project. For example, employees with a certain skill set some software or tool, etc.
In fact, the project managers usually have very less visibility into actual performance metrics of the available resources other than a few team members with whom they have worked directly. This is why a well-thought out and effective resource management strategy is important for the success of your projects.
Top 10 Tips for Effective Resource Management
Here are 10 best tips that can help increase the efficiency of managing resources in a business.
- People are resources
always remember that it is people or your team who are responsible for making your projects a success. Good and clear communication, leadership, and emotional intelligence are vital skills needed to inspire your team members. Good project managers know how to create a perfect combination of resource management tools and their team to make a transparent, collaborative, and constructive environment. - Keep a list of the planned projects for the year handy
If you know the pipeline well, it will help you to accurately forecast the skill sets and resources you would need. This way, it will be easier for you to assign and move resources for all of your projects. Doing this will enable optimal resource utilization, calculate the actual project effort, and track the project status accurately.
- Integrate technology
if you want to enhance your productivity, use latest technologies to automate various aspects of your project. For example, status reporting, timesheets, parameter calculations, dashboards, etc. Mundane tasks can reduce employee performance. However, by integrating technology, you can lessen the errors and free up workforce to reallocate them where needed. Also, using effective resource management tools that can help you pull the required information and create comprehensive dashboards and reports. This helps in building employee morale, giving proper visibility, and highlighting any possible glitches that could cost you huge at a later stage. - Create a resource capability database
Having a resource capability or skill database ready with all the updated information proves to be very beneficial. Imagine if you know the capability and skills of your resources, you can efficiently assign them on various projects easily. This resource capability database should be regularly updated so that it is beneficial and accomplishes the aim of effective resource management and utilization. It also enables the project managers in mapping the employee-employer goals in a better way.
- Detailed resource plan
A good resource plan should include all aspects about the required resource for a project from the start to the end. Besides helping you know the resources you need, you can also arrange for the best and effective use of these resources. The first step is identifying the resources you need and for how much time. Before finalizing the schedule, calculate the time you need each resource for and at which stage of the project. - Tracking the progress of the project
After the project plan is in place and you have allocated the work to your team, you start the project. But if there are delays in reaching the milestones and quality issues crop up, how will you identify it? Without having a way to track the project status and progress of how many tasks are completed on time, which ones are pending, things can go downhill. Your resources would be mismanaged, you will overshoot the budget, and your project deliverables will also be hit. Thus, tracking the project progress is very important.
- Visibility is vital for effective resource management
for a successful project; you should know what your resources are working on and what motivates them. It’s important to have a larger view of all your ongoing projects and available resources. Using project resource management software that supports enterprise resource planning, scheduling, and management will help you to identify potential pitfalls in an early stage. You can then take action accordingly and plan for whatever is needed to make it a success. - Be ready for the worst
Even if you plan well, there could be unforeseen circumstances when things go wrong in your project resource management. Foreseeing possible challenges and having procedures in place to fix them is important for any project’s success. In such a scenario, you could also have a system or tool that enables you to add external resources quickly, if the need be. - Always keep your team happy
It’s your team who keeps your business running and people always put in their best shot when they are passionate about what they do and are appreciated. Knowing your team members well and what they love doing can help you a lot. When you have to match a resource to a project or task, then this information will come in handy and will lead to optimal resource allocation. Additionally, keeping your team inspired and happy averts high employee turnover. - Opt for Outcome-Based Planning
It’s always beneficial to move to outcome-based planning where you have the outcome in mind. For creating an effective outcome-based plan, you should apply attributes, lifecycles, roadmaps to each deliverable and then make a detailed plan to take your project to a successful end. You can also improve your visibility and transparency by moving to outcome-based planning.
