Struggling to see who’s available? Priorities all to pot? No-one understands what you ACTUALLY do? Let’s fix common resource management challenges.
It’s a good job humans thrive on challenge because working ain’t easy – and resource management is no different in this respect.
Much as we love the art of resource planning and scheduling, we know Resource Managers can face some tough challenges in the workplace.
We’ve learned a lot through talking to 1000s of RM professionals over the years, so we’ve got some solutions to your biggest headaches.
For organizations with a low level of resource management maturity – by which we mean, you’re just starting out and haven’t got all the tools and processes perfected yet – a big challenge is getting the visibility you need into your resources.
You know you want to improve how you plan and allocate people to projects. But you don’t know who’s available, how much time they have, or what they’re good at. Without this centralized overview of your resources, you struggle to know who’s the best person for the job – and that can cause a lot of problems – like:
The way to overcome this very common resource management challenge is to create a centralized resource pool – a place where you store information about every resource in your organization. It should include the following information:
Having this information centrally stored and searchable allows everyone involved in resourcing projects to select the most appropriate person for each task – based on whether they have space to take on more work, if they have the right skills, and how much they’ll cost the project.
And that results in higher efficiency, better schedule and budget adherence, and improved deliverables and project performance.
Another common challenge for resource managers is how to prioritize resource allocation when projects themselves aren’t prioritized.
It makes sense that your most strategically valuable projects should have priority access to the most appropriate resources resources. But if projects aren’t prioritized – or worse, EVERY project is classed as a ‘top priority’ – then there’s no way to allocate resources efficiently.
Without project prioritization, resource managers can face:
To overcome this challenge, Resource Managers need to implement a project prioritization framework – a process that helps align resource allocation with your organization’s top objectives. To do this:
As a resource manager, you don’t need us to tell you how difficult skills management is. You need to:
But even with those practices perfected, with a limited number of resources and a seemingly endless pipeline of projects, you’ll come up against skills shortages. And it’s your job to work around them. So what can you do?
As we discussed earlier, centralizing your resource data is the first step. This will ensure that people have access to information about resources’ skills and proficiency when allocating them. But that’s just the start. For that to be effective, you also need to have a standardized list of skills and competencies, to ensure the data is searchable and no results are missed because people are using different terms to describe their skills - like ‘Java’ vs ‘programming languages’.
Plus, you’ll need a regular update process that involves resources checking and updating their skills information, with that checked and verified by their line manager.In terms of using data to conduct a skills gap analysis and inform planning, you should be looking at capacity and utilization reports filtered by skills. This will show you which skills are most and least in demand.
Then you can work with others – such as your HR team – to devise strategies to resolve this. These might be recruiting more programmers or upskilling existing (perhaps underutilized) resources. But what about when you simply can’t meet project needs due to skills gaps right here, right now?
This is when you need to get creative and even a little technical.
One problem resource managers face is spending way too much time on really simple stuff. But the real problem is that they don’t realize they’re spending too long on them. To these hard-working RM professionals, this is just business-as-usual and how long things take, right?
Wrong. There is another way. We’ve seen resource management teams use a wide variety of tech to try to tame their resource madness:
And we know that using appropriate resource management software is going to make your resource management processes quicker, easier, and more accurate. For example, RM software lets you:
It’s time to work smarter, guys, not harder, and stop squandering time on stuff that isn’t that difficult :-) If you need more convincing on the benefits of resource management software, check out some of these other articles…
Ok, so it’s kind of to be expected that people stare at you blankly at a party when they ask you what you do for a living. But – in the workplace – lack of understanding of what resource management is gets real tired, real quick.
In a professional setting, if people don’t understand what you do, they’re not able to work with you on your shared objectives. And they’re more likely to be nervous about your intentions. Are you here to make people redundant? Snoop on their timesheets? Exile them to unknown teams?We chatted with resource management expert Julie McKelvey RMCP® about this.
I think resource management is somewhat misunderstood. Some people think it's HR, some people think it's just scheduling. If you ask someone about what a workforce planner or a workforce analyst does, often they'll say it's completely different to resource management. But those roles are actually a lot closer to what we do, compared to HR. So there's a lot of education that needs to be done around resource management. In a lot of companies, you'll find people who have never worked with resource management before. Out of the five VPs I've worked with, for instance, only one of them had worked with resource management. It's completely new to them, and they might not buy into it or believe in it.’
In many organizations, resource management is a relatively new concept, which means it can take time to convince people of its value. As a result, you may get resistance from key stakeholders – even the people who will benefit the most. So how do you convince everyone – from senior leaders to project teams – that resource management is something they should support?
Firstly, you need to listen to people’s concerns and understand what’s worrying them. Then you can use your knowledge of the discipline to reassure them:
To really get people on your side and explain the value of resource management:
Every RM should be ready to deliver their elevator pitch with a C-suite executive. We talk about having a seat at the table, influencing, and being a strategic partner. How can you do that if you're not seen in that light? You need to be able to effectively communicate that value proposition and stand behind it. What it is you do and why you do what you do.’
Resource management operates at two levels – operational and strategic. Operational resource management is the day-to-day optimization of how resources are allocated to tasks and projects. Strategic resource management is about how resourcing supports broader organizational objectives. Strategic resource management is associated with higher resource management maturity and better business performance, so should be the endgame of ambitious resource managers like you. But what does it actually entail? And how do you elevate resource management from operational to strategic? Strategic resource management includes advanced practices such as:
Elevating purely operational resource management to a more strategic approach is challenging. It won’t be a quick fix. But here are some tips to start laying the groundwork.
For a Resource Manager, getting your RMCP® certification solidifies you as a true professional in the field, leveling you up from someone who provides staffing support to someone who is a strategic contributor to the business. I am able to draw clear connections between resource management and a company’s goals, priorities, and objectives, and communicate these connections clearly,’ explains Laura Dean Smith RMCP®, Director of Consulting Operations for Resource Management at Clarivate.
Many customers expect an uphill struggle when it comes to implementing dedicated resource management software – especially if they’re currently managing resources in a jumble of different tools. And with some software vendors, maybe it is. But not with Runn.
We will transition you from struggling with spreadsheets – or whatever else you’re using – to fully functioning RM software, fast. With Runn, you can opt to implement our software in-house yourselves or get support from our implementation team. If you opt for our help, we’ll get you up and running ASAP. You’ll start with a scoping session where our experts take time to understand:
From there, we’ll move on to data discovery, where we learn what data you have, where it’s held, and in what format. Then we’ll come back to you with a fully fledged plan – with all the phases and milestones mapped out – and a customer success manager to support you. We don’t just want to get you onto the system, we want you to succeed, so we’ll help with training, comms strategy – anything you need to win hearts and minds along the way.
Whether you’re sold on resource management software yet or not, give it a try. You’ve got nothing to lose and – trust us – a heck of a lot to gain.
