The ability to maximize resources is crucial to any business, regardless of its size. As with a lot of important business functions, resource management can be difficult to get right. This is especially difficult when you are working across international borders.
Making sure that your global team management methods are effective and positively received could be the difference between ultimate success or failure for your business.
Why resources are crucial to successful global team management
Resource management is the planned and deliberate allocation of a business’s financial, human, production and information-based materials. The management of these resources is often organized into:
- Managing skills
- Planning capacity
- Forecasting resources
If you fail to get resource management right, the impact will be felt across the business. Further, the world is a more globalized place today. Small and medium sized organizations often work across borders and have offices and teams in different parts of the world. This makes efficient project and resource management more difficult, but even more important to get right.
Let’s look at several of the challenges that managing projects across multiple locations can bring, and how resource management software can help solve them.
Sudden changes
When you are trying to run a project that consists of different time zones, cultures or languages, it is easier for things to go wrong. You must be able to adjust your project plans quickly to deal with sudden changes. For example, you may have several resources operating in a country that has a national holiday that you didn’t consider when planning your schedule. Multiply that by several countries and you could have a substantial amount of downtime on your hands unless you can adjust to the circumstances.
How a resource management tool can help
A sophisticated resource management tool will allow you to see where you have resources available to fill in at short notice. You can also perform what-if analysis to see how you could rearrange your resources to allow them to make the biggest impact across your project. Using what-if analysis, you can plan ahead and make sure you are ready for every eventuality.
Time management
Another potential issue for your global team management is making sure everyone is ‘on the same page’ regarding goals, as well as considering time zones that your different teams may work in.
How a resource management tool can help
A good resource management tool can track your teams’ workload, their project progress and consider the time zones in which they work. This is helpful for scheduling deadlines as well meetings throughout the project. Tempus Timesheets, for example, tracks employee hours with sophisticated timesheets that help improve accuracy and reporting, allowing you to discover inefficiencies, plan for holidays and vacations and potential time zone issues.
A clash of working methods
When projects are being conducted over international lines or sometimes as a joint venture between more than one company, there can often be numerous project teams that must work together. This brings up the potential for a clash between different working methods and management styles which can wreak havoc on production processes. This comes from different business processes clashing, a breakdown in organizational structure and poor communication.
How a resource management tool can help
Project managers need to be extremely focused on the structure of the project and how their resources, such as their employees (from different offices/countries/companies), are organized. The right resource management tool allows managers to plan, schedule and allocate in a way that keeps the potential for a clash of methods to a minimum. For example, thanks to an increased accuracy of planning and forecasting, project managers can make more effective staffing decisions, like putting together workgroups that will complement each other rather than get in each other’s way.
People power
Putting people at the center of projects is the best way of making sure they are planned and implemented successfully. This can sometimes be overlooked in the project management process. Resource management, on the other hand, is a concept that puts people at the center of the project. And quality resource management tools can allow the project manager to allocate their resources in the most efficient way, visualize specific scenarios and how certain decisions can have a major effect on the outcome of a project.
This people power is crucial to all kinds of companies, but even more so for those who operate internationally.
Tempus Resource helps you take control
Tempus Resource lets resource managers and project professionals run different sorts of scenarios, model data, and drive strategic decisions. This is even more important when considering the challenges of running projects that are being worked on in different parts of the world (or even in different parts of the country).
Tempus Resource is powerful, simple, and enables better analysis of your resources, making it easy to test ideas and make data-driven conclusions. Resource management is about making the best use of people to drive forward a company’s goals and strategy. Tempus Resource is a resource management tool that uses powerful what-if simulations to model project data so you can see what effect your decisions will have on a project outcome. This allows you to take control of your global organization with a state of the art solution no matter the size of the project.
To learn more about how resource management software can enable better global team management for your organization, request a demo.
