Simplified Resource Management for Project Success!

Always know when and how much of your resources are available. Visibility of your available resource enables you to plan and execute new business deals.

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Why do you Need Digital Resource Management Tool

Businesses whether small, medium or large are run by their resources. We all know it.

You may have the best ideas and ground breaking technology at your disposal, but nothing moves unless your people (teams) follow, adopt & execute them.

Also, there has been a rising uproar and unparalleled focus on resource management in the recent years. Why has it is become so crucial to business success suddenly?

  • Advent of new technology at a break-neck speed?
  • Highly global, diverse and increasingly mobile customer base?
  • Remote, global and highly digital workforce?
  • Increasingly volatile competition landscape?
  • Declining profit margins?
  • Have we become paranoid?
  • All of the above?

Well, whatever the reason, businesses have got to get a handle on their resource management to stay profitable and ahead of their competition. No second guesses here.

Manage resources effectively with Orangescrum

Get more done with Orangescrum

 

Before, we continue further, I would like to share some real world project & resource management challenges from my discussions with customers during their journey from hunting to adopting a digital resource management software.

Thomas Aubry, Head of IT, DIAM, France says – “He had a tough time knowing how his resources were stacked against assigned tasks and how well were the resources utilized. He had no visibility to it”.

All he had was a huge task list across projects under his vast portfolio, but no idea who were executing them, when are they expected to complete and what is their progress.

In other words, if you were to ask him – what is the status of Task A and who is working on it; and all you would get is a blank stare and a possible scratching on the head exercise.

I wouldn’t want to be in such a situation and neither did Thomas!

Similarly, Hayley Turner, CEO, Hailstorm Development, USA has a team of vibrant self-motivated remote team members across the United States. And her challenge was not knowing if she can take up new projects and of what size and duration. No visibility of her company’s resource availability.

And then we have Bill Sabatine, VP of Technical Services, Chroma Systems Solutions,Inc., USA who often ran into project and product development delays as he couldn’t access resources across his engineering, product testing and customer implementation teams.

Issues were being reworked and none of these three teams knew what the other was doing in real-time. Basically lack of cross-functional collaboration & significant resource allocation and resource utilization chaos.

What is the common theme across all the 3 distinct scenarios and what is its impact?

Well, all 3 of them needed a digital project management tool that acts as a single platform for end to end resource management.

So what does end to end resource management looks like?

A very simple and straightforward Wikipedia description would say –

Resource management is the efficient and effective development of an organization’s resources when they are needed. Such resources may include financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology (IT) and natural resources.”

At the same time, Project Management Institute (PMI) through their Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) methodology of project management says –

“Resource management is a key element to activity resource estimating and project human resource management. Both are essential components of a comprehensive project management plan to execute and monitor a project successfully”.

Resource Planning

In a more relevant term w.r.t to the digital project management world we live in resource management entails “identifying, allocating, utilizing and optimising your resources in the most effective manner to achieve your business goals and increase profits.”

Let us now look at the critical components of managing resources effectively.

Resource Availability

Resource Availability helps you with managing your team’s workloads optimally.  What does that mean really?

Let us take a look at a very common scenario when it comes to resource assignments to a new project.

You have a new project ->you do the project plan->estimate the time and skill requirements->identify resources-> assign resources-> start execution.

Well, a digital resource manager like Orangescrum would provide you a real time grid view of all your resources and their availability for an entire month instantly.

Resource Availability

You can further filter it out based on a specific project or skills.

What else? You get configurable options to define

  • Your work hours per day
  • Your company holidays
  • Your company weekends
  • Apply leaves

How does that matter? Significantly!

Try assigning tasks to a team member who is already occupied for the set hours of the day, or on leave or on a holiday –

You will be presented an intuitive pop-up showing all the other available members of the project to take upon the specific tasks as the originally intended resource isn’t available.

Moreover, the resource availability grid view also indicates how your resources are stacked:

  • Available
  • Booked
  • Overloaded
  • On-leave

In simpler terms, you have a 360 degree view of all your resources. You have real time answers to:

  • Who is underutilized?
  • Who is overloaded?
  • Who isn’t available?
  • How much work you can take up further?
  • Would you need new resources for upcoming projects?

Most importantly, you prevent resource burnout and associated challenges that stem from it!

Resource Utilization

Resource Utilization is considered to be a concrete indicator of your team’s productivity and billability.

Unless you know what your team is busy doing, you cannot account for the important activities let along plan for them.

Secondly, identifying your non-billable work and how much of your team’s actual time is spent on them is important to maintain profitability.

Your resources are utilized ok, but they aren’t generating revenue. How would you sustain this in the long run?

A real time view of your planned vs. actual spent can help you identify what’s wrong, where and why. So you have better control and improved chances of taking proactive corrective actions in a timely manner.

Resource Utilization

How can this be achieved?

Orangescrum’s resource utilization provides a granular view of your resources’ time spent across your entire project portfolio.

Irrespective of the number of users, projects or tasks, you get a neat report of

  • Resource name
  • Task name
  • Estimated hours
  • Actual spent
  • Task Type
  • Billable and Non-Billable

There are Burndown charts, time spent by task type charts, resource allocation report and a detailed project overview dashboard that provides end to end resource statistics instantly.

Final Thoughts

Having a digital resource management tool, takes away a lot of your administrative and manual overhead and allows your project managers to focus on items of strategic importance.

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Overall, you stay at the heart of all action and in control because resource and project management software provide you

  • Robust resource tracking and reporting
  • Real time visibility of project and resource status
  • Helps identify resource bottlenecks proactively
  • Enables cross functional collaboration across your company
  • Optimal workload management of your resources
  • Motivated and committed workforce
  • Healthy competition to stay productive
  • Achieve more with less

So what about you? How are you doing on the resource management front?

Got better suggestions or platform to help with your resource management needs?

If not, signup today to streamline your resource management hassles and deliver profitably!

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