Efficient management and utilization of resources is the prerequisite for successful delivery of projects and increasing business performance. It’s particularly important for project-based organizations that run multiple projects in parallel while their resources are limited.

An effective resource management system can significantly simplify and increase the efficiency of resource management processes; it can really become a resource manager’s right hand.

What are the essential capabilities of an effective resource management system? Let’s delve into the issue.

Prioritization capabilities

Setting clear and correct priorities is a must for successful management of multiple projects and their shared resources. In such an environment, resource conflicts are inevitable due to dependencies between projects and their activities: one employee can be required for several projects at the same time, which makes it difficult to assign him or her to the right task. So, an effective resource management system should analyze the resource constraints and dependencies between projects and determine project priorities so that a resource manager can make the right resource allocation decisions.

There’s one more reason why prioritization is important. If an RM solution prioritizes tasks across the whole project environment, employee productivity increases. When they know what tasks matter most for the moment, they won’t be trapped by bad multitasking or overloaded with work. Instead, they will know what to put their effort into, and the level of their efficiency will go up.

Therefore, automatic prioritization makes resource allocation more simple and efficient and drives productivity of every team member.

Facilitating efficient resource allocation

Efficient resource allocation can be challenging due to resource conflicts, increasing number of projects, siloed data, etc. A resource management solution can change the situation, and here is how.

  • Planning capacity for upcoming projects.

Before you can assign resources to a project, you need to be sure that there’s enough employees with necessary skills. With an effective resource management system you can have an idea of available resources, compare it to the resource demand, and find the way to bridge them to avoid unexpected resource shortages.

  • Prioritizing work.

As mentioned in the previous section, when you need to allocate resources in a multi-project environment, you need to be aware of the project priorities.

  • Providing the data on each team member’s skills, capacity, and availability.

This data is the basis for resource allocation. When it comes to managing resources in large organizations or distributed teams, having this data at hand will significantly save a resource manager’s time and effort and increase the efficiency of the resource allocation process.

  • Suggesting optimum resource allocation variants.

Advanced resource management systems can use the data on employees’ skills, capacity, and availability and suggest a perfect candidate for completing a task.

Keeping track of employees’ workload

Every organization wants its employees to be efficient, and balanced workload is the key to that. Balanced workload means that everyone works at their full capacity but isn’t overloaded. One more reason to keep an eye on the workload is that even one short period of improper workload can result in problems for the whole environment due to dependencies between projects. For example, when one employee is idle or can’t cope with their work due to being overwhelmed, it can negatively affect their teammates’ work.

An effective resource management tool can help in the following ways.

  1. It can detect improper workload – both overload and idleness.
  2. It can identify the reason for improper workload (the tasks that cause it).
  3. It can forecast improper workload in the future so that a resource manager can take timely measures to prevent bottlenecks.

Tracking performance

Employees’ performance is one of the indicators of the workflow’s health. In project management, resource performance is often given insufficient attention, and the management focus remains on the project level. However, the project level is the reflection of the resource performance. If people can’t cope with their tasks, it will inevitably have an impact on the state of the whole project environment resulting in project delays, cost overrun, etc. So, the right resource management system should have functionality for resource performance tracking and analysis:

  • it should give an insight into the completed vs remaining work;
  • it should show the output produced in relation to people’s capacity.

These capabilities will make it possible to not only assess team members’ productivity, but also detect resource bottlenecks. Therefore, an effective resource management system should provide both real-time and historical data for the comprehensive assessment of resource performance and timely prevention of issues affecting the workflow.

Improving decision-making

Making project and resource management decisions can be tough – first of all, because of uncertainty; second, because it involves processing large volumes of data and taking too many factors into account. Predictive capabilities of a resource management system can analyze essential data and turn it into insights (e.g., make forecasts) that help project and resource managers make their decisions. Let’s consider the example. Say, a company is going to intake a new project and a resource manager needs to staff it. The analysis of resource demand vs available capacity has shown the need for more capacity. A resource manager should decide whether it’s reasonable to hire more employees or to retrain available people from other resource groups. In this case, an AI-driven resource management solution can help make the right decision thanks to running simulations: you can change necessary parameters, analyze scenarios, and come up with the most reasonable decision. Similarly, you can test solutions to a variety of project- and resource-related issues, which is a great assistance in making the right management decisions.

All of the above mentioned capabilities are available in Epicflow, a resource management solution designed for work in a multi-project environment with a shared pool of resources. It allows you to optimize resource utilization so that you can deliver more projects with the same number of resources and in such a way increase business profitability.

Conclusion

An effective resource management system is a software solution that ensures maximum efficient resource allocation, utilization, and management for smooth project flow and increasing business productivity. To make the resource management process effective, a resource management tool’s should have the following capabilities:

  • Prioritization that contributes to proper resource allocation and employee productivity;
  • Optimizing resource allocation by providing visibility into the data on employee’s skills, capacity, and availability;
  • Contributing to efficient workload management – preventing employees from overload and idleness;
  • Opportunities for performance tracking and analysis, which will allows to assess employee productivity and timely detect bottlenecks that can hamper the workflow;
  • Providing the basis for informed decision-making.