Good resource management is the key to completing a project on time and on budget. Project managers (PMs) need to be prepared to make a lot of important decisions during a project, all of which are critical. Even if a project has top quality resources and a business has deep pockets, without proper resource management, neither will be able to succeed.
In this post we’re going to explore some key practices your business can employ to improve your projects and give you some resource management tips.
1. Planning (and forecasting) is essential
Once you’ve created your resource plan, you’ll need to prioritize allocating your most valuable resources. These resources have the most valuable skills on your project and will realistically perform the most work. By scheduling these resources first, you’ll be able to organize supporting resources around them to guarantee optimal performance.
Project managers should consider investing in resource management software that allows them to test different scenarios. To allocate resources optimally, you need to be able to visualize the consequences of reallocating resources. Intelligent software is available to help you with ‘What-if’ analysis, allowing you to see the hypothetical results of reallocating resources in real time, in a risk-free environment. This kind of functionality is essential for high-quality planning.
2. Agility in response to change
It’s inevitable that there will be changes during a project, either in budget, resources, or requirements. It’s therefore crucial that you implement a prioritization methodology before your project begins, so that consistent resource planning decisions can be made by all project managers.
Once this methodology has been agreed upon, you and your team will be able to reliably make decisions that align with your project management plan, giving you a quicker response time in the event of an issue. It’s also important to run scenarios based on different project outcomes so that any bottlenecks or roadblocks are identified and prevented before they impact your project. Your resource management software is an ideal solution to help you react quickly and effectively when you need to make decisions.
3. Gain visibility over resources
Tracking your project helps you monitor progress, report to stakeholders and manage your resources. Planning, allocating and reallocating resources is best done with a simple and effective resource management tool.
Your resource management software should track the performance of individual resources to help you identify over or underutilization. It’s essential that a project manager sees where a resource’s hours are allocated, as well as their individual skills, in order to optimize that resource. Additionally, tracking actual performance vs. projected performance will help you understand where time is being lost and adjust your allocation accordingly. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
4. Keep your resources productive and happy
During a project, a PM needs to be able to track how their resources are performing. Resources who are overworked will burn out, and those who are underworked will lose morale and become less productive. Your resource management software should be able to show you who’s working effectively, their skillsets, and their hours worked.
Tracking performance is key for ensuring that resources can perform optimally. Project managers should always make sure to recognize and reward good performance. Employee morale is greatly improved by positive feedback, which will improve the quality of your resources and minimize resource turnover during your projects.
5. Produce top quality reports and keep stakeholders informed
Once your stakeholders’ shared priorities have been established, it’s a PM’s job to regularly share reports and host meetings related to the project’s KPIs. Time reporting from resources should be as simple as possible to ensure that both time and work are reported accurately.
The project management software you use needs to simplify reporting as much as possible, both for resources and project managers. This will ensure better adoption. To cut down on administrative tasks, resource management software can generate reports automatically, freeing up valuable time for PMs to spend managing their resources.
Stakeholders need visibility of project progress and implementing software can help with this – reports can be automatically sent, indicating both the project’s progress and the performance of the allocated resources.
Achieving project success with Tempus Resource
To give your project the best chance at success, PMs need a powerful resource management solution. Tempus Resource gives you total visibility of your projects with resource modelling and intelligent cost reporting. With Tempus Resource, PMs can:
- Import resource data from any PPM tool on the market
- Create resource models with existing data
- Use simulation tools to run and analyze scenarios
- Use intelligent modelling to find even better resource allocation potential
- Monitor resource performance with automatically generated heatmaps and coolmaps
- Reduce risk and increase resource optimization
Find out more about how Tempus Resource can help you manage your project portfolios and improve your project success rate.
