Why should you care about Resource Management?

Consider the following scenario. 

Linda Thompson is a Senior Project Manager heading a rapidly expanding implementation team, and they handle anywhere between 350-500 projects every month. Her organization has seen tremendous growth over the last eight months, and keeping up with the demand has been quite challenging for Linda and her team. Despite the company flourishing numbers-wise, they were still riddled with constant project delays and poor visibility on who’s occupied where. 

Resource crunch, chaos, firefighting 

Owing to a growing business and limited visibility into project pipelines, employees were working long hours to try and deliver their work on time. And despite their best efforts, things were not going as planned. 

Some of Linda’s nightmarish challenges were:

1. Figuring out when a new project can begin and end 
2. Who all can be mapped onto a project based on availability 
3. Knowing whether the team is meeting its targets without burning out

To help put out these fires, Linda even hired people exclusively to handle resource planning and staffing, but they still lacked visibility and couldn’t get a grip on future demand and whether their current performance was optimal. 

Everyone on the team felt the pinch. They were overburdened, timelines were getting pushed, and the quality of work output took a massive hit. Linda would be on endless calls with customers explaining why their projects were delayed, and she’d assure them that things would get resolved soon. 

Linda knew there was a better approach but couldn’t afford to pause and reflect till she cleared the projects that were overdue for months. 

Little did she know then that an integrated project and resource management system was the answer to all her team’s problems. 

Does Linda’s predicament sound relatable to you? 

What is causing these problems?

A lack of visibility is what majorly prevents leaders like Linda from making good use of their available resources. Not having adequate visibility into the project pipeline and your resource capacity leads to work inefficiencies and ends up affecting the company's bottomline. 

But with proper resource planning, more projects can be completed on time with a high-quality output, and everyone on the team is happier. 

Read on to learn how Rocketlane's new Resource Management solution can help your organization thrive with optimal resource utilization. 

What is resource management?

While planning for projects, leaders like Linda need to know if they have the right people and capacity to carry their projects across the finish line.

Resource management is the process of planning, scheduling, and allocating your company's resources in the best possible way.

It helps project managers like Linda answer questions like:

1. What are the key roles needed for the project? 
2. Who on my team would be a good fit for these roles?
3. When will my key resources be available?  
4. When can I start a new project with confidence?
5. How can I avoid burnout for my team?

Introducing Rocketlane’s Resource Management Solution 

Rocketlane's Resource Management tool gives leaders the insight and visibility they need to allocate and manage their resources more effectively. Here’s how:

1. Get visibility across projects and team members

Rocketlane gives you a bird’s eye view of your team's bandwidth. You get visibility into how well is everyone occupied, who can take on more work and detect burnouts before they happen.

Rocketlane gives you a timeline view of all your projects. You can click on any project to see all the members working on that project, along with their roles and the time allocated to each member.

You can add/delete members to projects, increase/decrease the hours allocated for each project or task, and even include placeholders (proxies for actual people) during the planning stage and then replace them with team members later on.

This way, you can make the most of your team's bandwidth while ensuring no one is overburdened. 

All this information is neatly color-coded so that you can absorb it almost instantly. 

2. Find the right people for every project

Simply enter what kind of roles you need for your project, and the "Find Availability" feature will list all the available members who fit your criteria. You can see who the best matches are for each role based on availability and add those people to the project with just a single click. 

Let’s say Linda has a requirement for an Implementation Consultant with API expertise  who works in the PST time zone for an upcoming project. All she has to do is input the filters she’s looking for, and Rocketlane will immediately show Linda who the best matches are. Linda now spends far less time worrying about finding the right people for projects. 

3. Templatize your resourcing needs

Linda and her team have run hundreds of projects by now, and iterated enough to know what works best for their team. But they’re still forced to start each new project from scratch every time. Something seems amiss here. 

Shouldn’t Linda be able to hit the ground running faster when she takes on a new project, given that she’s delivered over a hundred projects so far?  

With Rocketlane, Linda can create project templates that come with the project plan, phases, tasks, timelines, and dependencies. She could even do role-based assignments for the tasks within the template itself.

Now, with resource management enabled, Linda can even templatize the hourly requirements for different roles needed to make the project successful. So, even when her team starts a new project, they know exactly who they will need, when, and how much time is expected from them. 

If you’ve defined these parameters in a template once, you don’t have to waste time doing them again. This helps take the mental math and guesswork out of resource planning.

4. Plan for your upcoming projects proactively

So far, Linda has always had to wait till the contractual paperwork has been signed to assign resources for her projects. But sometimes, this process gets delayed, and in the last-minute hustle to find people, she usually ends up overburdening her team.

With Resource Management, Linda now has the opportunity to be more proactive when it comes to resource planning. 

By integrating your CRM with Rocketlane, a project is automatically created when a deal is at, say, the “verbal commitment” stage. These projects are created with pre-built resource plans, and you have the option to tentatively plan and soft-allocate resources even before the paperwork formalities are completed.

Once the project gets the green signal, you can convert your tentative project plans into hard allocations with a single click. 

5. Make data-driven hiring decisions

Now that you have information about all the projects in your pipeline, what the most sought-after roles/functions are, and the actual availability of resources, you can adopt a more quantitative approach to resource planning and significantly improve your billable utilization rate. 

The demand screen distills this information to help leaders like Linda identify the week-on-week or month-on-month demand-supply balance for various roles in their company. 

If the demand for a role is running close to 100% of available capacity or going over for a sustained period of time, this is an indication that that role will become a bottleneck for smooth project delivery in the future. With this data, the organization can then consider hiring more people for that role or outsourcing some projects based on convenience. 

In conclusion…

Rocketlane's Resource Management solution makes it supremely easy for you to find the right people for every project, forecast demand, and complete projects on time.

Rocketlane’s unified product solution can even help you manage projects end-to-end, track where all your time is going, measure progress, and rapidly increase time-to-value. Try Rocketlane today!

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