Create viable project plans, achieve accurate estimates, and make valuable revenue gains - all thanks to the benefits of resource scheduling.
Resource scheduling is the glue that holds everything together in resource management. It is the point where all the dots connect and the data starts to make more sense.
Effective resource scheduling helps you ensure you leave no loose ends behind and boosts overall chances at project success.
But if you find yourself needing to communicate the benefits of resource scheduling to someone who is unfamiliar with the practice - for example, a project stakeholder who has never worked with a resource manager before - what are the biggest benefits you should point out?
We're here to lay out the most tangible contributions that resource scheduling can bring to your projects:
Above anything else, resource scheduling answers that one important question: who on your team is best suited for executing the project task?
And this question covers various factors, not just resource availability.
When done right, the resource scheduling process requires you to also look into things like capacity, skill sets, seniority, cost, employee preferences, etc. After all, it is not just about matching people with free hours to projects where they could spend them.
Instead, it is about making the best use of your project resources by looking at them from different angles and analyzing where they could make the biggest impact, both for their careers and the company.
Proper resource scheduling is all about visibility. It helps you look into every relevant piece of information about your resources, including their capacity and availability.
In turn, this allows you to understand the pace at which work can actually get done in your organization - what's a realistic estimate, and what isn't. This is vital information when it comes to conversations about what projects you need to prioritize.
We recently spoke to Cindy Tan, General Manager of IT Planning for TPG Telecom, who told us just how important tracking resource capacity is within large organizations and how they managed to reduce their capacity planning work from a weeks-long process to a two-day exercise.
Being able to show overutilization is so helpful for explaining why something has been delayed, or why something cannot start yet. When we can show our stakeholders that overutilization is so high, they can empathize and understand the constraints of the situation. It helps facilitate conversations about priorities, about moving things back if needed, because they can clearly see that we’re at capacity. It gives us the ability to go back to other parts of the business and say, ‘Look, these individuals really can’t take on any more work." - Cindy Tan, General Manager of IT Planning at TPG
Related: From Weeks to Two Days: How TPG Telecom Streamlined Their Capacity Planning with Runn ➡️
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Resource scheduling also gives you tangible data around utilization which makes it a lot easier to correctly identify hiring needs and get leadership buy-in for hiring those people. For instance, if the data shows that a particular role or skill is consistently overutilized, you might want to make a case for hiring additional people in this role (or outsourcing some of the work).
This kind of oversight helps you avoid adding too many people to your team, or too few - both of which can lead to a drop in morale and reduced productivity.
Staffing costs are often the single biggest expense in a project budget, which is why resource scheduling is so important when you're trying to deliver a project without blowing the budget: it's an area where your decision massively impact your ability to control the costs on a project.
Precise and realistic estimates of resource capacity can help you price a project accurately. Likewise, in-depth understanding of utilization rates will help you right-size your project team - meaning that you won't end up paying for resource capacity that, ultimately, you don't need.
Effective resource scheduling - avoiding unnecessary bench time, and ensuring that people are assigned to projects that are a good skills match - is a great way to increase utilization, and thus create more revenue.
And we're not talking about allocating stacks of extra assignments to your team members and overworking them - even a very small incremental increase in utilization can have an enormous impact.
According to the Resource Management Institute calculations, in a 300-person business, even a one percentage-point increase in utilization can lead to over $1M extra revenue.
Here's how that shakes down: a one-point increase in resource utilization on a full-time resource working 40 hours a week will secure 20.8 additional billable hours per year. Assuming a bill rate of $200 per hour, that one-point increase represents an additional $4,160 per year per person. Multiply that by the number of billable staff – in this example, 300 people – and that utilization boost is worth $1,248,000 in additional revenue.
When I presented the utilization figures for our organization to our Senior VP, it was eye-opening. He keeps a close eye on utilization rates now. It gave a financial justification for introducing non-billable roles. It showed that while the RMO isn’t directly generating revenue, it has a direct, positive impact on revenue." - Laura Dean-Smith, RMO Director at Clarivate
Resource scheduling improves impacts the entire project lifecycle - everything from delivery timelines and project budgets to employee morale and overall project workflow.
A recent RMI report revealed that poor resource forecasting and capacity planning make 88% of the problem that stop companies from achieving successful project outcomes. It's clear, then, that effective resource scheduling can be understood as an important risk mitigation factor.
Now more than ever, people are realizing the dangers of the trade-offs you make when you prioritize work over your wellbeing.
The risks of chronic stress and burnout are increasingly in the spotlight, and workers are voting with their feet. The World Economic Forum recently found that 48% of people would leave their job if it prevented them from enjoying their life.
Resource scheduling helps you protect that much-needed work-life balance by making sure no one works more hours than they are contracted to work. It allows you to maintain oversight of people's workloads, so that you can make adjustments when someone has too much on their plate.
Related: Work-Life Balance Statistics That Leaders Need to Know in 2024
Many businesses are only just catching on to the benefits that deliberate, data-driven resource scheduling decisions can bring.
Curious about how you can build buy-in for levelling up the resource management function in your organization? Struggling to articulate a business case that stakeholders can really get their teeth into?
Allow us to help! Take a look at our guides:
How to Get Buy-In for Resource Management ➡️
How to Build a Resource Management Function from the Ground Up ➡️
What the C-Suite Expects to See from Resource Management [Webinar 🎥]
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