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Last updated July 6th, 2022
If you want to do better project management, you have to keep a close eye on your projects’ deadlines and budgets, each and every day. That’s not easy to do. The best way to avoid any mistakes is to start using resource allocation to guarantee that your firm has the time and the staff to meet every project’s deadline.
What’s more, resource allocation can save you time and money by keeping your firm’s projects on schedule and within budget. Here are five common problems that businesses can overcome by using software to assist in resource allocation.
1. Planning and Prioritizing Projects
Remember that you’re in full control. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re in charge of planning your firm’s projects: there’s a lot of time and money riding on your ability to make accurate plans, and see those plans through to completion. At any point, you could make a mistake in scheduling or budgeting, and ruin the whole project.
When your project planning includes project management software with resource management, you can schedule every step of a project to see when your project will be complete, and you can see how any scheduling changes could affect your deadline. You can even assign a project’s different tasks to different employees, monitoring the project’s progress, and making necessary changes along the way.
2. Understanding Capacity
It’s hard to know who in your firm is available to work on a project. That’s why one of the secrets to good project planning is capacity, which is how many hours a given employee is available to work during a month, on average.
Resource allocation can help you make decisions based on what is most important to your firm. When you view a project by staff member, you have the power to make vital capacity-related choices for staffing projects and to make informed decisions for the future of your project.
3. Thinking Long-Term
A huge part of resource allocation is thinking ahead to where your project and your staff will be in weeks, months, or even years. Succeeding at project management means being able to guarantee that all your projects will be under budget, and will meet every deadline, so you need a smart way to make reliable decisions about how your projects will happen.
There are a lot of online project management software options out there, so you have to be careful. A good project management tool will prevent you from:
- Over-allocating tasks to your project staff. Any useful software lets you know your current capacity and future capacity for any project.
- Becoming under-staffed. A helpful tool will inform you are understaffed, so you can make hiring decisions at just the right time.
- Getting swamped at busy times. Every good project management software lets you restructure your project’s staffing, at any time, and shows you the results.
- Being caught off guard when your project’s deadlines or funding change. A smart tool for project management will allow you to make changes as the situation of your project evolves.
- Running into conflicts with other projects. Any worthwhile software will let you see all of your projects, at the same time, so you can see all of the projects your firm is working to complete.
4. Rolling with the Punches
Nothing ever goes as you’ve planned, and when you’re managing projects, you have to be prepared to change your project planning at a moment’s notice. If at any time you need to modify a project’s staffing, timeline, budget, or scope, then a project management tool will help your firm to easily adapt to change.
Any high-quality project management software uses dependencies to do resource allocation, which is a way of managing projects where a staffer must complete a certain task before a staffer can begin another task, to avoid wasting money and time. For example, resource allocation in BigTime has a tool called Shift Allocations that lets you move around your resources without re-entering anything, at all. Just move your resources where you need them to be.
5. Staying Informed
You are the person with your finger on the pulse of every project, so you need to be able to see the progress and status of every employee’s tasks, immediately and easily. A useful project management software will update you on your firm’s projects, in real-time, using informative graphics. Look at all the information you get from a quick glance at software like BigTime:
In seconds, you can answer questions like:
- Have I assigned all hours to all available staff members?
- Which staff member is logging the most hours on a particular project?
- Is a project on budget, right this second, and will it be on budget next month?
- What staffing changes would you need to make in order to get back on budget?
- Who has hours available, tomorrow, to work on a last-minute project?
If you need to make a big decision based on the best information you can find, a project management software will create reports using your resource allocation data, showing you everything you need to make smart choices.
You can even run reports based on resource allocation to do revenue forecasting. Whether you’re forecasting by project, or across staffers, you can learn which months you’ll be cash-flow positive, or which staff members will most likely make the most revenue during the next quarter. Any top-tier project management software gives you two ways to predict your firm’s revenue:
- Hourly revenue projection (as rate budget): revenue forecasting based on an employee’s hourly rate.
- Fixed-fee revenue projection (as % of overall budget): forecast revenue using a fixed amount that you set for a client.
When you look at everything you have to do to be good at project management, it can feel a little overwhelming, but there are a lot of excellent tools to help you do your best. Even when you’re at the top of your game, a top-rated project management software like BigTime gives you every tool you need for resource allocation, whenever and wherever your firm’s projects demand.
Ready to learn more about how proper resource allocation can transform your firm and team? Schedule a free demo of BigTime and read this helpful article on solving resource allocation problems.
