Discover 10+ expert best practices to elevate your resource management practices.
Over the last 12 months, Runn’s LEAP webinar series has hosted 18 guest speakers, discussing everything from the future of work and leading change to organizational resourcefulness and experimentation.
Reflecting back on one year of LEAP, we’ve picked our top insights from every webinar to help hone your professional skills and face the future with confidence.
1. Embrace the shift from productivity-focused to people-centric
2. Make listening the foundation of your resource management success
3. Think about roles, preferences, and passions – not just jobs
4. Don't micromanage – build trust
5. Build buy-in for resource management
6. Succeed with a skills inventory
7. Set your North Star with an RM charter
8. Start slow and steady when managing change
9. Measure employee happiness metrics
10. Communicate and mediate for different C-suite priorities
11. Integrate external resources in your blended workforce
Historically, resource management has been seen through a mechanical lens, focusing on the efficient allocation of resources to maximize output. In this view, people are merely cogs in the machine, interchangeable and – ultimately – unimportant individually.
However, in our first webinar, Tim Copeland and Nicole Tiefensee say they’ve noticed a welcome shift in recent years.
Today’s leading companies understand that effective resource management is not just about optimizing capacity, efficiency, and productivity. It’s increasingly concerned with aligning people’s interests, career ambitions, and professional development needs with organizational goals.
Resource management has evolved from a focus on project delivery and efficiency to a broader, strategic view that includes nurturing people's growth, passions, and learning opportunities," says Nicole Tiefensee.
This shift towards a more human-centric model understands that people will be more engaged and productive when they’re intrinsically motivated by their work. As Tim Copeland explains:
Understanding what truly motivates people on an intrinsic level is essential. It's not just about assigning tasks but about aligning those tasks with what excites and drives them. When employees are passionate about their work and see a clear connection between their role and their personal goals, they become more engaged and productive."
In a later webinar, Ed Frauenheim – former content director at Great Places to Work US – picks up this particular baton, saying:
A new way of organizing and allocating work is emerging, where companies are called to tap the creativity and the passions of the people. And to thrive in this new era, organizations truly must put the human into resource management."
He says that human skills - "like creativity, passion, character, and collaborative spirit" - will be the biggest source of competitive advantage for organizations in the future.
Add more insights to your resource management system
Organizations with strong resource management maturity integrate more insights into their RM data. Grow beyond simply recording time, skills, and cost. Add interests, development needs, and career goals. This gives resource managers more opportunities to match people with projects that will motivate high engagement and performance.
Understand what motivates your team members
Schedule regular 121s between resource managers and the people they’re responsible for scheduling. Resource managers should know people individually in order to allocate work effectively. Don’t overload your RMs – aim for a ratio where they can still make those essential personal connections.
Use resource scheduling for upskilling
Identify opportunities to challenge and develop your people through stretch assignments. Talk to project managers so they can see the bigger picture behind your assignments. And make sure project schedules and budgets are adjusted to accommodate any extra time or training required.
Listening comes up a lot in our webinar series. Whether that’s listening to senior managers and aligning your strategy to their objectives, or listening to individuals outline their interests and career aspirations, success comes from understanding the organization, its people, and their priorities.
It’s Christine Robinson – on our webinar on resource management best practices – who first touches on listening, as a source of employee engagement and retention:
An industry-agnostic best practice for resource managers is truly listening. Having a keen and acute understanding of the pulse of the organization. What’s driving people right now? What are they looking for – in terms of diversity of experience or evolution of where they are in their career? Longevity, as an organization, is driven by the employer really understanding that."
She gives a practical example of how resource managers are the interface between an organization and its most valuable resource – people – and can use synergies to benefit both parties.
If the business is looking to expand into a new region and the resource manager, through having one-on-one conversations with individuals, knows that there's a high performer who is looking to relocate to that region. That's a perfect opportunity to raise that and explore how to retain that top performer."
The power of listening is also discussed by other webinar panelists, particularly concerning building a value proposition for resource management.
In our webinar on starting a Resource Management Office from scratch, Laura Dean-Smith describes the "listening tour" she undertook before establishing the business case for a new RMO at Clarivate:
I spent about two months going and talking to each of the senior level leaders and asked them lots of questions about resourcing and their understanding of resource management practices. Through this listening tour, I identified some common themes and areas where people were struggling, finding challenges, and experiencing some overload.
I knew that’s where resource management could come in and help, and really serve the business. So I outlined all of the problems and challenges that I had heard from the different groups, and then I took those and turned them into a proposal for how I could address each of these different areas."
Make time to listen
Gary Ward advocates for making time for listening:
Most companies have town halls, company meetings… I know everybody's busy. RM is a notoriously busy space. But prioritize that stuff. Take the time out and plug yourself into the organization. You don't want RM in their own silo. Join those meetings. Listen to what the C-suite is talking about. Listen to what your counterparts are talking about. It will clue you into what's top of mind for them."
Listen at every level
It isn’t just listening to the C-suite that will make your resource management practices more successful. Get onto the ground and listen to the pain points and challenges people face every day – like low visibility into resource skills or overcomplicated time-tracking processes. This will help you focus your practice on the most impactful activities.
Listen often
In our webinar on mistakes to avoid, Martha Arias says:
Do quarterly sync-ups, as a minimum, with the different executives across the company. Especially after your company's organizational goal setting. That’s a good time to talk to different counterparts and say 'What are your goals for the year? How can we partner and enable each other?'"
Edwin Jensen ran a large successful recruitment agency until global lockdowns threw his business model into disarray. During the pandemic, Jensen lost 70% of his original business. But just 24 months later, he’d pivoted and grown their net income 650%
The secret to this workforce transformation? Jensen puts it down to being a 'teal' organization – one that replaces traditional hierarchy with self-management and connects employees with a deeper sense of purpose.
The thing that rose to the top was this teal operating system, which empowered every person to define what their greatest and most meaningful work is,’ he explains. ‘We ended up architecting a process called the role advice process, which empowers the individual to set their own course, with the advice and consent of those around them."
Jensen says it is the idea of self-actualization and listening to each individual’s goals:
What I believe is most potentially valuable to resource managers is to ask who knows best, what their own greatest work could be. The individual knows. The manager does not know and could never know."
Ed Frauenheim agrees:
Resource managers need to create profiles that tap into and understand people's passions. In other words, how do we let employees say what their meaningful work is? Let's create some visibility into what makes people light up, what they really want to do."
Ask meaningful questions
Edwin Jensen described the "role advice process" he used to surface people’s unique goals:
There are a few questions that everyone needs to answer. 'What are you passionate about? What do you want to do? What do you want to learn? What kind of difference do you want to make?' That should be publicly available. That should be for every person's profile, the number one thing that you can actually see."
Invite people to apply for projects
Ed Frauenheim suggests creating a system where people can apply for positions on projects that interest them:
Another step in this idea toward more bottom-up resource management is posting the job needs and inviting team members to apply for it. Let them raise their hands. This adds transparency to that resource allocation process. And lets you find out who's really fired up about filling the job gaps."
Redesign roles around meaning
The panelists discussed role design as one of the most important ways to create meaningful work. The art of designing jobs to give employees oversight of a whole process, as well as the autonomy to deliver and refine it as they see fit. It’s a concept you can read more about in Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor.
Resourcefulness is about doing more with less – and this webinar asked how can we be resourceful with our resources. At Runn, we’d say that it’s about matching the right people to the right project at the right time. That way, you unlock people’s intrinsic motivation and productivity, and reduce wasteful bench time by optimizing your resource utilization.
But Jeff Koziatek used personal examples to highlight another wasteful process – micromanagement. He describes it as the opposite of trust:
If we don't trust other people, we're not empowering our teams. And if we're not empowering our teams, who's doing the work? I’m doing the work because I'm not trusting my team. And if I'm doing the work, if I'm micromanaging, then I'm definitely not getting more done."
It’s a point borne out by Tim Copeland’s experience of trusting and empowering the team at Runn:
It’s the concept of what is intrinsically motivating to people versus what they’re told to do. I think it's a setback, this idea that I'm your manager and I'm going to tell you what to do. It works. It's an effective strategy. But it misses the point of all the other good stuff that can come with embracing people as the whole person. If you are an organization that’s really able to understand who is doing the work and why they're motivated to do the work, you don't have to do as much management.
That's one of the key things I get asked. 'How the heck do you manage everybody in a fully distributed workforce?' And the answer isn't 'Well, you've got to track every hour and see how that gets spent.' You give people trust and trust they will do the right thing."
Intrinsic motivation means less management
People-positive resource management aims to match people with work that interests them and aligns with their career aspirations. This alignment means people are more intrinsically motivated to complete their work and require less management. Employee autonomy and trust also feed into this approach – hire good people and empower them to do their best work.
Less management means more time
With less time spent on day-to-day management, managers have more time to focus on value-adding activities, like really getting to know their resources, in order to match them to more meaningful work. Something we’ll discuss later.
Unlike HR and other more established disciplines, resource management is still proving its credentials as an essential business function. As such, RM professionals can face an uphill struggle to get buy-in. That’s why it’s important to create a strong value proposition that articulates the value that resource management can deliver.
Laura Dean-Smith spoke about using her listening tour to define the value prop for resource management at Clarivate – addressing specific pain points and challenges that resource management can resolve at every level of the organization.
Christine Robinson explains how this strategic alignment helps secure buy-in. "A successful resource management function is not successful because resource management is successful,’ says Christine, addressing a common misconception in the industry:
A resource management function is successful when it allows the organization to be successful through resource management. Resource managers are partners in the business. They should understand the strategic goals of the business so that they can execute on that strategic vision."
It’s essential that senior managers understand this value proposition to fully leverage it in their business, says Gary Ward. "C-suite investment in resource management needs to go beyond dollars," he explains:
Resource Management has to have autonomy, has to be empowered to make decisions in order to deliver positive outcomes. It must have a seat at the table and it requires advocacy in the organization. If a resource management team remains reactive, tactical, or purely administrative, you've lost an opportunity to hold a competitive edge – and missed the true value proposition of what an RMO can bring to an organization."
Once the C-suite is on board, Martha recommends securing a senior champion who can advocate your value to the rest of the organization:
This one is critical, especially if you're a new resource management team and you're new to the company in terms of the value you’re bringing,’ she says. ‘You need leadership championing the team, having an executive sponsor that can help vocalize the value of resource management, and encourage the support and engagement of your team from the rest of the organization."
Create a value proposition unique to your business
Resource management touches on every element of a business and there are industry-agnostic best practices that apply in every circumstance – such as optimizing resource utilization. However, your value proposition will be unique to the needs of your business. Are you looking to reduce costs, improve productivity, boost employee retention, increase innovation? Align your value prop to strategic objectives to maximize buy-in.
Prepare your elevator pitch
In a separate webinar, Gary Ward advocates for practicing an elevator pitch for 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."
The Ready is a highly experimental consultancy, testing different processes to find the most effective operating model.
As part of their strategy to be people-positive and complexity-conscious, The Ready implemented a skills matrix. It includes 10 ‘transformer’ skills that consultants need to have the desired impact for their clients – such as leadership, entrepreneurship, teaming, and self-management.
Everyone who works at The Ready self-assesses their skills on a four-point scale of beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert. This is then opened up to peers and colleagues who know the individual well, who add their own assessment. An algorithm then creates a balanced skill profile for every consultant.
Discussing The Ready’s skills matrix, Tabea Soriano explains:
It allows us to be more nuanced about project assignment. We’ve moved from 'Hey, I need a body to fill this role' to 'I need someone with an intermediate level in org design who wants to practice and level up’".
While the skills mapping began as a way to meet organizational and client needs more effectively, it has become a core part of The Ready’s people-positive approach:
It allows people to assess where they are. They can cast their own trajectory and use their discretionary funding to upskill. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are needed for individual growth. Our skills matrix plays into the agency and mastery of our members," explains Tabea.
Sarah pictures consulting as an "old-school record playing with three dials – our people, the organization, and our client". The team is "constantly calibrating" to achieve the optimum results for all three.
She explains that the skills matrix is just part of their people-positive strategy, which also includes radical transparency into projects. Every project is promoted internally – including details of the skills needed and the decision criteria – and everyone is invited to apply. This mirrors Ed Frauenheim’s insights from a previous webinar about how inviting ‘handraisers’ creates more engaged teams.
Increase visibility into skills
Using Runn has allowed The Ready to be much more strategic about skills matching. Centralized skills information helps match people to projects that will engage and interest them. But it also provides an opportunity for self-reflection – to understand what skills individuals have and would like to develop – and constructive feedback – how colleagues perceive their abilities.
Use capacity planning to match people to pipeline
The Ready has been able to optimize its resources and pipeline by using capacity planning. Runn provides insights into projects in their pipeline, so they can get ahead of resource allocations by assessing available skills and capacity well in advance.
Great decisions come from quality information
Sarah says that an important process is "getting stuff out of people’s heads" and into a place and format where it can inform decision-making. This is where tech is transformative, as it provides a central repository for information on the skills people have and the skills that projects need – and helps make productive connections between the two.
The concept of a resource management charter comes up in several of our webinars. In our RM mistakes to avoid webinar, Gary Ward said not having one is a big blunder. But what is it?
An RMO charter is a critical document that clarifies the role, the responsibilities, and value proposition of resource management for stakeholders,’ he explains. ‘It should start with a one-page executive summary that speaks their language. But it's also an orienting North Star for the team itself. What's the vision? What are you trying to achieve? It gets everyone aligned on priorities, frameworks, where you're going in the future."
It’s something that Laura Dean-Smith is very familiar with, having created the RM charter for the inaugural Resource Management Office at Clarivate.
In our webinar on How to Successfully Grow a Resource Management Function, she explains that you draft your RM charter early on to articulate resource management’s overall value proposition. But you don’t finish it until you’ve taken on board the needs and feedback of all stakeholders.
At the start of her tenure, Laura used a listening tour to understand what senior leaders, middle managers, and individual resources needed from the resource management function. She then built her resource management team and involved them in creating the charter that would guide and govern them.
I documented what my vision for this RMO was – the areas we were going to support, the different responsibilities and boundaries. But the other important thing I did was get buy-in from my team. I had them work with me and we structured how we wanted to approach resource management using best practices. We did our mission and vision and values and purpose together so we could all have that sense of ownership over these core concepts."
Learn how to begin writing your own resource management charter in our article based on the webinar ➡️ How to Build a Resource Management Function from Scratch.
Listen to stakeholders
Laura knew what resource management best practices she wanted to embed in her organization. But before she could maximize RM’s impact, she needed to understand the C-suite’s strategic priorities and the pain points of people on the ground. This helped her establish the key areas where resource management could add the most value and create a compelling value proposition to secure buy-in.
Involve your team
To ensure buy-in from her team of resource managers, Laura involved them in setting the vision and mission of the RMO. This ensures everyone is on the same page and aligned around the strategic objectives of the team.
Refresh and recalibrate
An RMO charter isn’t a static document. It changes with the needs and the priorities of the business. Schedule time to review and recalibrate it every year, particularly after the C-suite has set the new strategic priorities for the business.
A curse of resource management is knowing the transformative impact it can have in an organization – but facing skepticism and a lack of understanding of the discipline. So while you may be tempted to jump in and start making change, our experts advise taking things slower at first. Have empathy with people who may be scared by change, build trust and buy-in, and create powerful processes. Then you’ll be ready to implement change confidently and quickly.
Rahul Sirimanna talked about how his team successfully introduced a resource management platform – Runn – at Royal Bank of Canada, by taking the time to really understand stakeholders’ needs before a mass rollout. They engaged multiple stakeholders in a lengthy pilot process to ensure the system addressed every pain point before their wider implementation.
You have to go slow in the beginning to be able to go fast later. And what I mean by that is the fact that we spent a lot of time with the pilot process. A lot of people tend to pilot for four weeks and then jump into production. But we really wanted to make sure that we got this right, so we spent almost eight months piloting the platform from a technology perspective, from a process perspective, to get it right."
It’s important to note that taking time doesn’t mean slowing to a halt. "It’s about balancing patience and persistence," explains Kent H. Frazier:
Too much patience, we get a little lazy and the change maybe doesn't take effect. But too much persistence and maybe we get a little reckless and we're not bringing people along with us. We always need to balance those tensions of patience and persistence."
Engage senior leadership champion
Rahul knew that getting buy-in for resource management software might be challenging and implementing it would take time. He wanted to maintain pilot user engagement during this period. Part of his strategy was to get C-suite champions to publicly recognize the ongoing efforts of the testing team, highlighting their critical role in the organization’s future success.
Be empathetic
Recognize that change is difficult and use empathy to help people through challenging times. The introduction of resource management practices, time tracking, new software, etc., can trigger anxiety. Don’t they trust us? Will I lose control of my resources? Are management looking to reduce staff numbers? Take the time to understand why people may be resistant and address their concerns.
Think about resource management KPIs and you’ll probably jump straight to resource utilization, billable time, and schedule variance.
But it wouldn’t be a Runn webinar if we didn’t look beyond these financial and productivity metrics and think about bringing the human story to resource management data.
How do we know whether our resource management practices are creating a people-positive work environment – one that ultimately contributes to better client outcomes, supports retention goals, and strengthens future capabilities?
In our webinar on Measuring Success in Resource Management, David and Marzena suggested some people-centric KPIs that resource managers should be measuring.
Internal mobility is one, says Marzena:
I think the metrics that should start to matter more are things like internal mobility. We no longer have the luxury of just being able to go out to the market and get people. Everyone is trying to get the same resources. They are in great demand. You want people to stay in the business. And therefore, we need to be looking at how we create more opportunities within the business for people to grow, and to learn and become the different kinds of people that we need them to be."
She also recommends using the eNPS to assess employee satisfaction – the employee Net Promoter Score. This assesses whether your current employees are promotors (satisfied) or detractors (dissatisfied) with you as an employer. This can influence engagement and retention. But also recruitment if detractors are vocal about their negative experience.
People-centric KPIs drive organizational outcomes
Employee well-being and satisfaction metrics provide insights into the employee experience, which can feed into strategic objectives around recruitment, retention, employer reputation, turnover costs, succession planning, and more.
Check-in on team engagement
One of the processes in Marzena’s organization is a weekly check-in on team member engagement:
On a weekly basis we measure a simple question – how good we feel in the project. And if something is wrong, we know we have a risk or issue to resolve."
More maturity = more measures
As your organization’s resource management practices mature, so will the data you collect. Low-maturity organizations might focus primarily on metrics like costs and utilization, while advanced functions will collect more comprehensive insights that include both productivity and people-centric KPIs.
C-suite alignment is crucial for resource management to achieve its potential as a strategic partner within an organization. So how can resource management professionals communicate at a higher level to ensure buy-in and respect for the function?
Start at "10,000 feet" says Cindy Tan, providing the big picture that matters at board level. The C-suite doesn’t need to be bogged down in day-to-day operational issues.
Gary Ward agrees:
Think what matters to them? What's important to them? What's top of mind for them? It’s a matter of stepping away from the moving jigsaw pieces and being able to elevate the communication level to topics and themes that matter to the C-suite. Take a step back, look at the picture holistically, and inform others about what that picture looks like."
Within this advice, our experts note that the C-suite is not a monolithic entity but rather a group of leaders, each with their own unique objectives and priorities. The CFO will be interested in financial objectives, the CTO in technology, etc. This diversity can pose challenges for aligning resource management activities across the board.
To overcome this "be Switzerland" says Ward, suggesting resource managers should avoid getting directly involved in conflicting priorities. The role of RM, says Cindy Tan, is to provide senior leaders with the data and insights they need to reach their own conclusions.
Scenario planning is a powerful tool for resource managers, especially when using RM software that makes it easy to visualize data and model different opportunities. By presenting the C-suite with different options – and showing the impact on metrics like cost, utilization, capacity, etc – resource managers can position themselves as strategic advisors, supporting the best overall outcomes for the organization as a whole.
Make your data indispensable
Gary Ward asks "How often are you being hit up for data? How much pressure are you under?" This demand underscores the C-suite's reliance on RMO data for informed decision-making. "If that data is coming from the resource management function, then you're obviously valued by the C suite," agrees Tim.
Check you’re aligned
Our experts gave three ways to check you’re aligned with the C-suite: you have a seat at the table in major decision-making processes, your data is in demand, and you enjoy strategic advisor status. If these signs are missing, you need to elevate your position in the organization.
The blended workforce combines internal and external resources to achieve business objectives. As it grows in popularity, it affords key benefits to businesses – such as flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and access to in-demand expertise. But it also poses challenges for effective resource management.
Laura Dean-Smith says:
When I think about the blended workforce, I think “What are we blending?” We're blending a pool of internal employees – who enjoy all the benefits that come with being an employee for a company – with a pool of resources who are external to the organization – who really enjoy working on a contract basis for whatever reason.
The purpose is to blend the stability of your internal employees with a pool of external resources to adapt to resource demand. It’s about delivering a staffing model that works for the priorities of leadership at that time."
But it isn’t just about leveraging the unique benefits of different employment types, as Kent Frazier observes. It’s also about blending "people, perspectives, wants, needs, motivations and a whole host of things that matter to people at different stages of life."
And that’s what makes it a rewarding challenge for resource managers. Not only optimizing different sources of talent but ‘creating inspiring possibilities’ for a wide range of people.
RMs need to merge and manage different talent sources into a single successful workforce – often with less visibility into who’s available, and via an arms-length management process.
Understand different motivations
Internal employees typically seek stability, while external workers value flexibility and autonomy. Laura highlights the importance of treating external workers with the same care as internal ones – but says that understanding their unique motivations can lead to higher returns and more productive relationships.
Centralize external resource management
Managing external resources effectively requires visibility and integration. At Clarivate, Laura’s team addresses this by having a dedicated External Resource Manager who ensures clear expectations and strong relationships, treating external workers with the same rigor as internal employees.
Educate leadership on the value of external workers
Leadership must recognize that freelancers are skilled professionals who choose flexibility. Laura stresses the need to shift your organizational mindset from seeing external workers as indebted to your organization to valuable professional partners – especially at senior levels, where legacy views might prevail.
Create a positive partner experience
To engage external workers, organizations should create a partner experience that values their contributions. Fair treatment, clear communication, and respect are essential to ensuring external workers feel valued and invested in the business.
Over the past year, it's been a complete joy to host so many talented, knowledgeable resource management experts, and to dive into what excites them about this dynamic discipline.
With that said, however, we've barely even scratched the surface of the different topics, debates, and masterclasses that we want to explore in our webinar series! There is so much yet to cover - so stick with us, and be sure to sign up for a new webinar every month.
