Higher efficiency, better utilization, happier clients? Let's explore the objectives of resource management, and how they ladder up to business success.
Resource management objectives are the backbone of any project-based business. Whether your goals are to cut costs, improve productivity, increase the ROI of your human resources, or create sustainable growth, resource management can get you there.
But achieving these objectives isn’t always straightforward. Striking the right balance between immediate operational needs and long-term strategic goals can feel overwhelming.
In this article, we’ll explore the short-term and long-term objectives of resource management.
You’ll learn about common short-term resource management objectives – like optimizing allocations and delivering projects on budget.
Then discover how these shorter-term goals pave the way for longer-term objectives – including talent development, financial growth, and better strategic alignment – and, ultimately, business success.
When aiming to achieve any major objective, both short- and long-term goals are important. Imagine you want to get fitter: that’s your long-term target. But to get there, you need to achieve short-term goals like getting to the gym three times a week or fitting a hike into your weekends.
The same principle applies to resource management. Short-term goals are actionable, achievable, and tangible – and help lay the groundwork for loftier, long-term objectives. Setting both short- and long-term goals should be part of your planning process.
Here’s how some common short-term resource management objectives ladder up to longer-term strategic goals:
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some common resource management objectives, both short- and longer-term.
Short-term objectives in resource management are designed to meet immediate operational needs – staffing projects effectively to ensure clients are satisfied, financial goals are met, and staff have a balanced workload.
Some of the most common short-term resource management goals include:
This is the cornerstone of resource management: getting the right people in the right place at the right time. It’s about matching project tasks to team members who have the skills and capacity to deliver the work when it’s needed, without busting the budget or overstretching your staff. Day-to-day, optimal resource planning ensures projects run to schedule, on budget, and deliver required customer outcomes. And, operationally speaking, it helps create balanced workloads for your team. This prevents underutilization (which costs your business money) or overutilization (which risks burnout and staff turnover, among other things).
Project overruns can be costly. Missed deadlines can damage client relationships, undermine your reputation, and send costs spiraling. Operationally, late projects cause a ripple effect that risks other projects too. Effective resource management helps minimize these risks by ensuring resources are available when needed – ensuring projects can run to schedule. It also helps you identify and resolve issues in advance, such as resource shortages or clashes, before they impact delivery.
In consulting and professional services, people are often the biggest expense. Resource management ensures you aren’t overstaffing projects (by allocating more people than you need) or overservicing them (by staffing projects with more senior team members than the tasks require). Having the right number of appropriately skilled staff allocated to projects maximizes profitability, and controls costs without undermining quality or satisfaction.
A final short-term goal of resource management is to increase agility. Project-based businesses are inherently dynamic. New projects come on board. Existing projects evolve. Organizations need to be able to respond to change effectively and not let it derail them.
Resource management provides greater visibility into resource availability, capacity, and skill sets, so you’re better prepared when the unexpected happens. If a project hits problems, or a new priority drops, you can quickly assess your options and pivot to Plan B, minimizing disruption.
Further reading: The Do's & Don'ts of Resource Planning in Agile Organizations ➡️
The long-term objectives of resource management are to support the organization’s long term vision.
While specific goals vary from business to business, typical long-term objectives include rightsizing the workforce, talent development and retention, and – of course – contributing positively to financial performance.
All of these objectives ladder up to an organization’s goals around efficiency, profitability, growth, and competitive advantage.
Resource management is about aligning your organization’s most valuable – and possibly expensive – assets with strategic objectives. It aims to put people in places where they can have the highest impact on business objectives.
Whether that’s lending their software development skills to a critical project for a high-value client, or supporting an internal initiative that’s going to move the organization forward (like implementing a new IT platform). Strategic alignment happens when senior managers and resource management professionals communicate, and RMs are consulted on how staff deployment and development can achieve organizational strategy.
For example, if the C-suite wants to reduce costs, resource management can focus on improving utilization and reducing hiring expenses. Or if leaders want to reduce operational disruption, RM can look at retention and succession planning.
Strategic alignment makes sure everyone is pulling in the same direction to contribute to the greatest good for the business. It means resource managers can prioritize projects and human resources effectively, so that their actions deliver the best value for the business.
Rightsizing the workforce is about predicting and maintaining the optimal number of employees – and roles and skills – to meet client demand. Not overspending on staff and skills you don’t need. Not spreading staff too thinly because you’ve underestimated how many people you need. It’s about hitting the Goldilocks spot where everything is JUST right.
When you’ve rightsized the workforce, you have the correct number of resources to deliver the work available, working a reasonable workload that keeps them productive and engaged.
Of course, you’ve also got one eye on the future too, and you’ll be forecasting future needs so you can make adjustments to workforce size and composition if anything changes.
By aligning workforce size with demand and future projects, businesses avoid unnecessary staffing costs and improve resource efficiency. But they also position themselves to achieve other objectives by securing the resources, talent, and skills they need for success.
Learn more: Staffing Smart: How to Identify Hiring Needs ➡️
Another long-term objective of resource management is talent development and retention. Employee turnover is disruptive, harms morale, and hemorrhages institutional knowledge. And recruitment is both expensive and time-consuming, with new recruits taking time to get up to speed.
According to Built-In, losing an employee can cost a company one-half to two times the employee’s salary. Effective resource management is essential for employee retention. Resource and project managers:
Plus, with a reputation for fair treatment and career development, organizations are well-placed to become employers of choice, further reducing the challenges and cost of recruitment.
Talent development and retention activities reduce unnecessary costs, contributing to better financial performance overall. They also attract, retain, and develop the talent that organizations need to succeed.
Every organization wants to improve its financial performance, and resource management is an excellent way to achieve it. By optimizing resource utilization, you can minimize idle time, maximize billable hours, and ensure a steady stream of revenue.
Plus, better resource forecasting avoids costly mistakes like last-minute hiring, excessive overtime, or avoidable project delays.
Furthermore, when resource and project managers monitor utilization and resource capacity, they can uncover spare time and internal capabilities that can be monetized – for example, by taking on additional projects.
Curious about the ROI of resource management? The RMI estimates that, with a bill rate of $200 per hour and a workforce of 300 individuals, a single-point increase in utilization could potentially yield an additional $1,248,000 in revenue.
Better financial performance supports organizational objectives around profitability, sustainability, growth, and long-term success. It can help organizations enter new markets, take on new opportunities, and weather economic storms better.
Short-term goals often focus on immediate needs, like optimizing current resource allocation or managing workloads for ongoing projects. Long-term goals, on the other hand, are focused on bigger-picture outcomes such as improving workforce agility, fostering talent development, and supporting overall business growth.
Striking the right balance between these types of goals is key to ensuring both immediate improvements and sustained success.
Short-term goals are great because they’re manageable and tangible – and this makes them very motivating. Check a short-term goal off your list and your brain is flooded with endorphins and perhaps your inbox is awash with management praise.
Whereas long-term goals can feel like unassailable, a distant destination you have to trudge to. However, focusing too much on short-term goals can mean you lose sight of the big picture. And that would be a mistake.
For example, increasing utilization might be a valuable short-term goal. But going too far and starting to over-allocate resources will backfire. Overallocation leads to burnout, which undermines the broader goal to boost productivity (as well as being a horrible thing for your team to experience).
When assessing your short-term successes, always link them back to the overarching objectives and their KPIs. This ensures that your efforts contribute to long-term strategic planning and avoid unintended consequences that could accidentally derail your progress.
Begin by understanding the organization’s key business goals for the year. How can resource management contribute to these?
Whether it's improving profitability, enhancing operational efficiency, or enabling growth, aligning resource management goals with broader business objectives is the foundation for success.
This shift from purely operational to strategic resource management is a key step in increasing resource management maturity and boosting the ROI that resource management delivers.
Assign responsibility for achieving each goal to specific team members or departments and set KPIs. This ensures goals progress.
Have regular check-ins to help maintain momentum, address any issues that arise, and ensure there are no unintended consequences where one goal undermines another.
For example, imagine Sales has a KPI to increase project numbers but Delivery is trying to improve client satisfaction. Delivery can’t take on more projects without undermining current project outcomes…or getting more resources. This will need addressing if both goals are to be met.
Further reading: 5 Resource Management KPIs You Should Be Tracking ➡️
To measure progress towards your short- and long-term objectives, you’ll need to crunch the numbers. For example, utilization rates, customer satisfaction scores, project schedule variance, etc.
You’ll need a reliable source of data to assess and demonstrate KPIs, as well as good data governance to ensure it’s accurate and up-to-date.
A resource management system automatically collects and analyses real-time resourcing data, to monitor your progress against objectives. Using real-time visual dashboards, or in-depth reports, resource managers can see and understand stats easily – no data analyst required. These valuable insights can then feed into further goal setting.
Whatever your short- or long-term resource management goals, they’ll be easier to achieve with Runn.
Whether you need to:
…Runn provides the intuitive tools and data insights to get you there.
