Too busy to think about business resource planning? You'd be surprised how much difference even small improvements could make in the long run.
Your team is putting in the hours – but are they moving your business in the right direction? Without intentional resource planning, time and talent can be wasted on the wrong priorities.
But let’s be realistic: when you’re already buried in the day-to-day demands of leadership, finding the time to revamp inefficient processes can feel like a luxury you can’t afford.
We hear this all the time from the department leads we speak to: they often come to us with broken processes and clunky systems, unsure where to begin, or dreading the time investment required to make meaningful changes.
That’s why this guide is designed to be practical and easy to apply. You’ll learn the core benefits of effective resource planning and discover quick-win strategies that require minimal effort and compound in impact – so you can start seeing measurable results without the headache.
Business resource planning involves managing and optimizing a business’s human resources to achieve its goals efficiently.
It mainly focuses on strategic workforce planning, forecasting, and decision-making to ensure employees are assigned to projects aligned with their strengths. In doing so, you can optimize your human resources, meeting your business objectives faster.
Strategically planning and optimally using human resources helps businesses in many respects: workforce planning, performance management, project allocation, training and development, and resource utilization.
As a result, it contributes to success in the following ways:
And I'm always keen to emphasize the fact that you don't need to move the needle on resource planning too much in order to see some pretty enormous impacts. Even small optimizations can make a big difference – as you can see from the following example!
Although resource planning brings a ton of benefits, unlocking them is easier said than done. There are some common challenges that you are likely to face – but forewarned is forearmed, so let's go through them now so that you won't be surprised by them later:
It’s hard to recall which employee excels in which area, even in small to medium sized teams. As a result, you may find yourself frequently having to check with them or their line manager about their skills to assign projects that are right up their alley.
But this takes a ton of back and forth – one that can be easily avoided, particularly if you curate a centralized, up-to-date inventory of their skills.
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Left unaddressed though, this challenge ends up creating project delays, resource and budget waste, and unforeseen talent shortages that prevent businesses from quickly adapting to market changes.
Sure, demand forecasting won't always be 100% accurate, but it can certainly be improved so it’s close to the mark.
But what typically happens are miscalculations in understanding how well-staffed, understaffed, or overstaffed you are. Fluctuating market conditions, seasonal demand variations, and evolving business needs all contribute to it.
Not to mention, poor resource availability data prevents you from correctly understanding and balancing supply and demand, contributing to uncertainty in predicting future workforce needs.
With employees working on project tasks that don’t fully engage their skills, strengths, and interests, turnover is bound to go up.
Plus, if resource allocation fails to factor in employee availability correctly, you not only see delays in project execution but also reduced employee satisfaction.
To add, a lack of career growth opportunities, inefficient succession planning, and a company-centered learning and development policy reduce retention.
The result? You find yourself spending time hiring and onboarding new folks frequently, as well as having to stomach the costs associated with acquiring new employees versus retaining the folks already in your organization.
Yet another common hurdle you’re likely to have come across: relying on a handful of employees while others end up on the bench, underutilized.
This often happens unplanned. But over-utilization of a few employees and underutilization of others is far more common than you’d imagine.
A lack of real-time insight into resource capacity and workload often leads to this problem. Lack of awareness of which employees are due an off or have recently taken time off is another reason — because really, there’s only so much you can ask about or reserve in your mind.
Ultimately, such workload imbalance births burnout for some employees and a lack of engagement in their work for others who aren’t working to their optimal capacity.
Again, a centralized skills inventory noting employee availability goes a long way in improving your business resource planning, as you’ll learn in the next section.
Further reading: How to Create a Bench Report ➡️
The challenges we’ve discussed so far – from poor resource allocation to imbalanced utilization – all compound to cause ineffective project planning.
Picture this: you dedicate a team of resources you think are best for a specific, high-value client while ensuring they’re available for the duration of the project timeline.
But what you don’t realize is that the tasks involved take up more time than originally planned. And one of the core team members is due for parental leave soon, after having helped with several other high-value projects for months.
The result: you either insist the employee stay on board for a few more days (which may not be possible) or you look for an alternative person to take on the work.
See what’s happening here? Over time, if these sorts of last-minute, poorly-planned requests happen, employee dissatisfaction starts growing. What’s more, by having to bring on a replacement, your project budget takes a hit.
In summary, a lack of proper project planning, workload management, and resource allocation lead to unexpected costs – even delays in project timelines.
Lastly, a lack of insight into your workforce’s current skillset and interests prevents you from having a comprehensive overview of your skills shortage.
This means any training you offer may not match with the reality of the skills makeup your company needs to actually develop.
Not knowing employees’ interests in the skills they want to build further aggravates this problem as it means employees take on upskilling workshops that aren’t highly relevant to their interests – resulting in poor engagement and a waste of your learning and development budget.
While there are tons of different strategies you can implement, these four are our top recommended ones.
You’ll note that each strategy interlinks with another, making implementation easy – streamlining your resource management overall:
This involves talking to employees and their managers and reviewing performance reports to determine individuals’ skills, strengths, and interests.
The idea is to collate the findings into an accessible, central skills inventory so you can revisit this log every time you plan projects and assign tasks. This ensures all tasks are allocated to people with the right skill set, which improves both deliverable quality and employee engagement.
Once your inventory is ready, revisit your business goals to identify skills your workforce is lacking to create a talent development plan that aligns with your growth objectives.
This is technically called a skills gap analysis, which aids both your upskilling and hiring strategies.
Within your skills inventory, add another (automatically) updated column noting employee availability.
Doing so enables you to allocate resources based on not only their skills but also their availability, drastically reducing resource clashes and ensuring projects are completed by their defined timelines.
Dig deeper: Resource Allocation Strategy: From Planning to Execution ➡️
By tracking individuals’ utilization rate, you can further create an employee-centered utilization plan that ensures everyone is working to their optimal capacity on projects aligned with their skills.
Another closely related strategy that sits on the back of skills management and resource optimization is capacity planning.
It involves reviewing your business demand based on seasonal fluctuations, upcoming projects, and market circumstances. Reviewing past project workflow also helps you get an accurate picture of your demand.
When done, go on to analyze headcount, going through available skills at the same time. Use the information you gather to forecast project needs.
Such strategic capacity planning also helps inform hiring decisions by showing you whether you really need to hire new people or use contractors.
Further reading: Tackle the 9 Most Common Capacity Planning Challenges ➡️
Finally, optimize business resource planning by automating processes to reduce manual work, improve performance tracking and workforce planning, and streamline business operations.
To get started here, review your core business processes: how are you currently tracking skills, planning projects, keeping tabs on employee performance and project data, and assigning tasks?
If you’re managing your resources in Excel, you’ll likely find yourself struggling to keep your data accurate and up to date. You’ll also notice that your processes easily become disjointed, forcing you to juggle multiple tools that don’t seamlessly work together—slowing you down and creating inefficiencies.
A headache-free approach here is to use a resource planning tool to bring all processes to one place, including capacity planning, resource allocation, and project management.
Not only does this automate processes, but it also boosts productivity and cross-team collaboration and gives you easy access to real-time data for making informed decisions.
Here’s a detailed guide laying out eight more reasons to move from spreadsheets to a reliable resource management software ➡️
Resource planning encourages effective resource usage to achieve business goals. The best way to unlock its myriad of benefits is by automating the process.
Ready to start optimizing your human resources? We’ll leave you with the top five questions to ask if you want to start managing your resources effectively.
