As a professional, delivering high-quality work before project deadlines goes a long way in building your reputation and increasing your domain authority. The more projects you can provide, the higher your chances of getting referred to work that is rewarding and pays better. However, while you take on more projects, are you maximizing all your resources in a way that increases your profit?
Ensuring that you optimize your resources to meet your current projects’ demands can be challenging, especially when you do not use your project management software for consultants with resource management. You can quickly lose track of staff and time and miss out on project opportunities.
The best resource management software has remarkable features that enable you to enjoy helpful perks, including:
- Reducing your project’s execution costs
- Avoiding delays in meeting project deadlines
- Improving your team’s productivity
- Better employee experience
But first, let’s look at the definition of resource management and why it matters to you.
What Is Resource Management?
Resource management involves planning, optimizing, and allocating your resources to deliver high-quality projects on time. The primary purpose of resource management is to enhance your efficiency and develop optimal ways to use available resources to execute successful projects.
Several resource management tools help you tackle problems, such as:
- Prioritizing projects using guesswork
- Delegating overwhelming project tasks
- Getting caught off guard by unfeasible deadlines
For delegating tasks, resource management tools help you identify which employees are available to work and allow you to allocate specific periods according to the degree of the assignment. This feature fosters an environment where you can keep staff engaged with the right amount of work without leading to burnout or too much staff bench time.
Due to the difference in each assignment, you require employees with a particular set of skills to handle specific projects in line with their strengths. You can conveniently choose the best employee for the job with resource capacity planning software. From configuring categories of skills according to your business environment to rating your employees based on proficiency of each skill, finding the right person for the job is more straightforward.
The Importance of Resource Management
You can implement strategies that enhance your work productivity and increase your business’s growth rate. A resource management system for professional services provides several features that contribute to your business, including your work rate, revenue, and employee satisfaction.
Promote Productivity
Focus on executing your project tasks rather than spending valuable hours doing tiresome chores such as data entry. Agile organizations that use project management tools and resources grow revenue faster than non-agile ones. BigTime’s resource management software makes it convenient and smooth to optimize your staff capacity and concentrate your efforts on clearly-stated checkpoints you need to execute your projects successfully.
Reduce Project Costs
With crystal clear visibility of your project’s needs, you spend less on project resources. With capacity planning software, you can allocate the right resources to suitable projects and avoid exceeding your budget. You can also cut your budget when you engage resources previously used for other projects that have been completed.
Move Resources Flexibly
Organizations often lose resources due to managing projects inefficiently. The best resource planning tools let you view all your resources and allocate them accordingly across all your current projects. This effect distribution ensures you do not focus all your assets on one high-priority project and forsake other projects.
Real-Time Feedback
With BigTime, you can view the number of hours your team works in different filters, such as billable time and total input. Such information enables you to make changes according to feedback, optimize billable time and make resource projections. Often, organizations cannot track KPIs in real-time, primarily due to a lack of resource management software solutions.
Make Better Hiring Decisions
Having a better view of your staff capacity gives you a better understanding of areas where you need to hire new talent. You can see each employee’s assignments for any project and view metrics such as their departments and roles. Resource management software also has a feature to measure your team’s efficiency by month.
Resource Management Techniques
Practicing these techniques will help you manage your resources optimally and boost your operations’ output.
Resource Allocation
You can allocate project tasks and essential resources to your employees with the certainty that they can get the job done. This technique ensures that you make the most use of your available resources and that the right resources for a project are available.
Resource Utilization
It is essential that you avoid under-allocating resources that you can use to settle more tasks and get work done fast. On the other hand, it would be best to also watch out for over-allocating resources to prevent burnout while ensuring the resources can sustainably deliver results from project to project.
Resource Leveling
This technique refers to adjusting task assignments based on available resources to get the maximum results while avoiding burnout and damage.
Resource Smoothing
You need to adjust scheduled hours such that there is a maximum limit that staff cannot exceed to balance work time and avoid spikes of uneven workloads.
Resource Forecasting
With the information from the previous techniques, you can plan for upcoming projects and the best resources to allocate.
Request a personalized demo today to learn more about how BigTime enables you to optimize your staff capacity and use your resources efficiently to grow your business.
