How to do Resource Management in Orangescrum

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Resource Management is centered around the principle of maximizing return on investment. It is a very strategic arm of the business as a whole. Because resources are essentially costs and the more you manage to keep costs down, the more profit you derive out of your projects.

Similarly the tactical aspects of resource management involve

- greater productivity
- timely completion of initiatives
- allocating resources to the most profitable ventures

minimizing bench pool to zero
prevent conflicts and chaos
delivering services and support optimally

In summary, Resource Management is doing more with less. It is about effectively planning the optimal utilization of your resources to obtain maximum efficiency.

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Contents

Why is effective resource management important?

Resource management is crucial to business success and to keep your projects profitable.

It is about making a thorough quantitative and qualitative assessment of your resource requirements. Right from

number of resources required
skill sets required to execute your projects
productivity rates of your teams
billable to non-billable hour ratio
future skill requirements
training and up-skill requirements

Smart agencies and organizations understand the impact and benefits of these assessments and depute a dedicated resource manager too.

While project managers are responsible for project execution, resource managers are accountable for resource allocation requirements for the whole organization.

You can base your assessment only when you have untampered data to analyses and make informed decisions.

And this is where you must deploy robust resource management tools that track end to end task execution, user activities and time metrics of your projects.

Benefits of effective Resource Management

Getting lost in the execution is very easy. It is a trap hard to escape.

One has to be very mindful in tracking the project team’s activities, real time progress and value (perceived and realized) of the final outcomes.

Project Managers must have ready answers for

How aligned are the deliverables with the agreed objective?
How best did we meet the defined timelines and schedules?
Were the agreed quality parameters met?
Did we deliver within budget?

OK! But how – resource management is a critical input to all the above answers.

Some quick benefits of effective resource management –

It provides you with an overview of everyone and everything involved in your project.
It gives you control over your project & reduces administrative costs
Maximizes resource efficiency & increases accountability
Prevents miscommunication mishaps
Helps in taking right decisions

How does Orangescrum help in effective Resource Management?

Let’s take a look at how you can manage your resources using Orangescrum resource management features with ItelliWare BI Analytics Product Marketing project. This will help you to understand below features easily.

In this project, we will be adding 6 resources of the organization- Daniel, Richard, Asin, Scarlett, Michel & Evelyn

Now, Resource management in Orangescrum revolves around 3 major features:

Resource Availability
Resource Utilization
Resource Allocation

1. Resource Availability

Resource Availability solves one of the most key problems that Resource/Project managers face; tracking available resources for certain tasks.

Imagine you are ready with your project plan, task estimates but you are not aware on projects or task your resources are currently working on.

In that case, how would you assign tasks to the resource?

You would have to continuously follow up with resources, juggle up between projects, tasks & you may end up with –

Overloaded & demotivated resources
Less than optimal utilization of resources
Missing project deadlines
Resource conflicts

How does Resource Availability help in fixing above problems?

Resource availability helps in analyzing availability of resources by providing:

Resource Grid view of availability data of all resources
Identify available & overloaded resources. This helps in better utilization of resources
Booked hours of the resources in different projects. This ensures effective task allocation and enhances effective management of task deadlines.

How can you use Resource Availability?

In the project ItelliWare BI Analytics Product Marketing, we have added some tasks and assigned resources to show you how resource availability works.

In order to access Resource Availability, you can follow the below steps:

From the left panel, hover on the Resource Management and click on Resource Availability.
By default, tool will show the availability data of all the resources for next 30 days. You can click Next or Previous button to find the data for previous or future dates
If you want to know about availability status of project resources, then you can select the specific project from project drop-down. Here is how Resource availability looks like:

From the above image we can know following information-

- Daniel & Scarlett are Overbooked or Overloaded marked in Blue on 6^th
- Richard is on Leave or Vacation marked in Grey on 4^th Feb but A.
- Evelyn is completely Booked marked in Red on 3^rd Feb & however, Scarlett is partially booked for 5 hours in 6^th
- Richard is Available marked in Green on 6^th
You can click on the specific slots to see list of tasks they are assigned.

So considering the availability status, you can change task timelines or assignee.

Also, when you assign resources to specific tasks, the tool will prompt you, if the resource is not available, you change the assignee or due date of the task.

“The logic is – you must enter the start date and estimated hours. If resource is unavailable the resultant prompt will list all other project members with their availability dates & hours in sync with your original provided start date and estimated hours.”

If you would like to change the task assignee, then you can select another resource from above available resource list and click Change. Once clicked, the task will be assigned to the newly selected resource.
If you would like to assign the task to the same resource, then you click Create Any Way.

Thus, Resource availability helps in providing optimum clarity of available resources without struggling and shuffling across projects or task assignments.

2. Resource Utilization:

Now, once you are aware of the availability of the resources, next concern of any Resource/Project manager is to assign specific tasks to resources and track if the tasks are being completed within the estimated time by the resources.

Apart from that, they should be able to know if the resource are being utilized properly and track the performance of resource in the project in terms of time & cost.

Optimal Resource Utilization helps in:

Conflict resolution
Deliver projects on or before time
Improve productivity
Prevent deviation
Increases revenue

How Orangescrum Resource Utilization helps you achieve above goals?

As the name suggests, Resource Utilization helps you understand how optimally resources are being utilized in your organization.

It helps you to track individual & team productivity across projects.

From Resource Utilization, you can get following information:

Total hours spent on a project vs estimated time
Billable and non-billable time spent across tasks
Total hours spent by employees or resources on a particular date or day
Which task types consumed the most time of your team

How to use Resource Utilization?

In order to access Resource Utilization, you can follow the below steps-

From the left panel, hover on the Resource Management and click on Resource Utilization.
By default, tool shows the estimated vs spent hour data of all resources for present month.
However, you can get details of specific project(s) or resource(s) by applying specific filters.
For example, as project manager, you would like to know how much time is spent by resources in the last week on ItelliWare BI Analytics Product Marketing
For this, we need to select the specific project by clicking on top right of the page. Click Project to select the project. Further, select Date and click Last Week. You can also enable other columns by clicking

From here, we can know

- Total 7 hrs 40 mins are spent out of estimated 13hrs
- Daniel, Evenlyn, Michael, Richard, Asin & Scarlett have worked on the tasks
- Total Billable hours are 2 hrs 50 mins & Non-Billable hours are 4 hrs 50 mins.
Apart from this, you can also track the estimated vs spent hours of specific resources.
For this, I need to select the specific project by clicking on top right of the page. Click Resource & select the specific resource. Further, select Date to select the date range within which you want to see the data.

Here, we have selected Daniel Jones and Last quarter as date range. This filter tells you

- Total Estimated hours of the tasks he worked on: 288 hrs
- Total Logged hours in those tasks: 132 hrs 50 mins
- Total Billable hours spent by Daniel: 65 hrs 9 mins
- Total Non-Billable hours spent by Daniel: 67 hrs 41 mins

3. Resource Allocation:

Resource allocation report is a one-stop window to find details of resource(s) allocated to projects, tasks and generate spent/estimated hour reports for specific time periods.

What information can you get from Resource allocation report?

From Resource allocation report, you can find out following details:-

- of tasks created/updated in a certain period of time.
- Total number of Estimated and Spent hours of tasks in a certain period of time.
- List of project & tasks assigned to a certain resource within that time range.
- List of tasks active, overdue and upcoming tasks across a project.
- List of tasks active, overdue and upcoming tasks assigned to a resource.
- You can export the report and present to top management

How to use Resource Allocation Report?

Before learning about how to use Resource Allocation Report, we need to know about the various report elements.

Elements in Resource Allocation Report:

Resource name: It shows the list of active users in the account. Clicking on a certain resource, will refresh the project and task info w.r.t the selected resource.
Project name: It shows the list of projects created in the account. Clicking on a certain project, the tool shows the relevant data associated with that project.
Resource Allocation by hours: It shows the list of tasks created/update with a certain time range and estimated hours assigned. On clicking, tool shows the spent hours across those tasks.
Project: Total number of active projects in the tool.
Task: As per items selected in Resource name & Project name, tool shows the total number of tasks created for a certain period of time.
Active tasks: It shows the list of New & In-progress tasks within a time range.
Overdue task: As the name suggests, it shows the list overdue tasks within a time range.
Future: Tasks with no due date or future start date appears here.

What are the various reports generated within Resource Allocation Dashboard?

Report1 – Number of tasks or projects assigned to a resource

Hover on Reports from left panel.
Click Resource Allocation Report under the menu.
Select the resource for which you want to see the data.
Select the time From date and To date for which you want to see the data.
On right hand side of page, you will find no. of projects and task assigned to resources.

Report 2 – List of Active, Overdue and Upcoming tasks in a project

Hover on Reports from left panel.
Click Resource Allocation Report under the menu.
Select Project for which you want see the details of tasks.
Select the time From date and To date for which you want to see the data
Scroll down the page to see the list of Active, Overdue and Upcoming tasks in a project.

Note- Please note that the task list shows according to the time range that is selected. Say, I have selected From as May 22, 2019 and To as Jul 3, 2019

Active task: Active tasks will show the list of tasks New & In-progress tasks created or updated under May 22, 2019- Jul 3, 2019.

Overdue task: Overdue tasks will show the list of tasks depends upon below conditions:

Tasks whose due date has crossed the current date.
If the task is created/updated on above time range and has crossed the current date, then the task will be listed in the Overdue

Future tasks: Future tasks will show the list of tasks depends upon below conditions:

Tasks have no start date and end date
Tasks created in the above date range and have start date after Jul 3, 2019

Report 3 – Find out estimated vs spent hours for project in a certain date range

Hover on Reports from left panel.
Click Resource Allocation Report under the menu.
Select Project for which you want to see the details of tasks.
Select the time From date and To date for which you want to see the data.
Click to see the estimated or spent hours details.

If a task has start date as 2 Jul 2019 and end date as 3 Jul 2019 and estimated hour is 4 hours, then it will divide the task estimated hours assigning 2 hours for each day. This happens when resource availability is not enabled.

Bringing it all together

Running an agency, managing large teams and complex projects can get messy.

Project management & collaboration tools reduce that mess for you.

Orangescrum resource management features are closely linked with the task and time management capabilities to offer holistic insights of your project progress.