According to the Project Management Institute’s Talent Gap report, the project management industry will need to hire 2.3 million people globally each year to keep up with predicted job openings by 2030. As the industry grows and more people gravitate to jobs in project management, individuals will need to develop skills to make themselves valuable to employers and be successful in this field.
A Resource Manager is someone who knows your team members’ skills, experience, career desires and capacity. This person is tasked with knowing your company’s initiatives, upcoming projects, and the people who can help meet those goals. It’s the Resource Manager’s job to skillfully assign the right people to projects to fit their experience and availability. This person will also be closely monitoring project interdependencies to make sure work can get completed on schedule, and employees are not over-allocated or under-allocated. It’s more about optimizing allocation, not simply matching any resource to a project.
A Project Manager keeps track of the time, tasks, and budget of one or more specific projects. This position is more involved on the project work level. A Resource Manager is responsible for a more holistic look at multiple projects, and their work encompasses a wider range of strategic thinking. In the Resource Manager role, the person takes a big picture look at the company’s priorities and employee utilization. With a view of the entire pipeline of projects and work, a Resource Manager can identify potential future bottlenecks that can mean outside contractors or new staff members who need to be hired.
A Resource Manager puts the right people on the projects that fit their experience at the time that they are available. The Resource Manager looks at all current work and projects in the pipeline and pairs individuals with that work based on their bandwidth and skills. A Resource Manager is responsible for three key areas:
It’s important for a Resource Manager to understand your company’s priorities, big initiatives, and pipeline of work to optimize allocations. If there are interdependencies that could create conflict down the road, a Resource Manager can make the necessary moves and allocation changes to ensure projects keep moving forward.
A Resource Manager needs to have insight into team members, including their various skills that could be useful on various projects, the experience they gained at previous jobs, their desired career trajectory, and their workload capacity. With these in mind, a successful Resource Manager can ensure employees are assigned to projects that maximize their skills, provide opportunities for growth, and don’t lead to burnout or boredom.
By understanding each resource’s skills, experience and capacity, a Resource Manager can get the right people. By understanding what skills are required to deliver results on a particular project, a Resource Manager can get the right people to the right project. By understanding the current project demands, pipeline work, and project interdependencies, a Resource Manager can get those right people to the right project at the right time.
It’s simple – assign the right person to the project that uses their strength, skills, and availability. Here are seven areas of focus to help Resource Managers achieve their goals and serve their organizations wisely.
It’s important for any Resource Manager to remember their role as a strategic advisor and stay focused on the big picture, rather than get marred by tasks related to project completion. It’s the job of a Resource Manager to stay productive and serve the organization by staying in that holistic view and allowing allocated resources to do their assigned work. By staying above the project, you can step in and course-correct if a project’s timeline is awry or employees are feeling burnout.
When adding a new project to the portfolio, a Resource Manager first needs to get a handle on realistic deadlines, budgets, and resources needed before making any promises to the client. It’s important to be honest about their expectations and upfront about where their project falls in your list of priorities. This approach can feel intimidating when leadership requests a project, but a prepared Resource Manager can use supporting data to accurately communicate current capacity and limitations.
While it’s a valuable skill to trust your gut, experienced Resource Managers will not simply utilize the available data; they will take advantage of this wealth of knowledge as tangible evidence as to why a project can or cannot be successful. You should access data from past projects with similar budgets, timelines, resources needed, and challenges that were encountered. Resource management software that maintains this historic information in one, seamless platform to easily reference this data at any given time is invaluable.
All Resource Managers should have proper resource management software to help manage all of the information. An Excel spreadsheet does not help conduct the analysis needed to assign people to the right projects and budget their time wisely. You need insight easily available on skills, capacity, project demands and work in the pipeline. It’s important to select a resource management platform that can deliver insight into skills, capacity, project demands and pipeline work across the business. When priorities shift or new challenges arise, it’s important for the platform to provide What-If scenarios to help plan properly for change.
Resource Managers pour their energy into their active portfolio projects, but day-to-day operations tend to take precedent over planning for hypothetical scenarios. Performing real-time modeling with your organization’s current data allows Resource Managers to see the potential impact of changing various project factors, such as skill sets, deadlines, and budgets. Prioritizing the creation of these scenarios equips a Resource Manager to plan far beyond the next deadline.
Workdays slip away when you’re swallowed up by shifting schedules, unexpected resource variables, and client requests for changes. Pressure mounts in the rush to meet a deadline, but evolving logistics – driven by you or the client – may stray from the project’s original purpose. Keep revisiting the “why” of a project with the client and your resources executing it to maintain an intentional focus on the desired outcome.
As a Resource Manager, you are trusted to oversee a portfolio of projects and their respective resources for the necessary growth and success of your company. Given that responsibility, don’t be afraid to ask for the things you need to be successful. Whether that’s a more robust software program, clearer communication, or respect of you and your resources’ time regarding project deadlines and expectations, speak up. You deserve the support to do your best work.
If you do a quick Internet search of “resource manager tips”, you’ll be bombarded with articles and to-do lists. There are lots of trainings available. Some well-regarded in the PM industry include certifications from the Project Management Institute, the Resource Management Institute, the International Project Management Association, and the PMO Global Alliance.
For those whose companies are operating, or wanting to operate, in an Agile environment, there are additional opportunities for trainings and certifications offered by the Scaled Agile Framework® and the Project Management Institute.
According to the Project Management Institute’s Talent Gap report, the project management industry will need to hire 2.3 million people globally each year to keep up with predicted job openings by 2030. As the industry grows and more people gravitate to jobs in project management, individuals will need to develop skills to make themselves valuable to employers and be successful in this field.
Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry is a purpose-built, resource portfolio management solution providing many Fortune 500 companies with resource forecasting and capacity planning solutions that inform strategic decisions and improve business agility. Tempus gives Resource Managers actionable intelligence, cutting-edge analytics, and real-time scenario analysis. To schedule a demo of Tempus, click the button below.
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