Optimize your project planning process with a resource matrix - making sure you assemble the right team, with the right skills, every time.
If you prioritize assigning resources to project tasks based on their skills and availability, you’ll find a resource matrix a handy tool for charting resource requirements against project requirements.
By pre-planning employee requirements, it also helps you optimize resource utilization.
The good news? Making a resource matrix doesn’t take a ton of work — making it easy for you to reap its benefits. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how to make one.
A resource matrix is a chart mapping out project tasks against available resources required to complete them. Also called a staffing chart or resource allocation matrix, it is a visual representation that helps guide project planning based on resource availability.
It includes information like roles or names of team members, their skills, the tasks they’d work on, and their availability. Project managers often use it to guide their conversations with resource managers to identify, source, and allocate resources for new projects.
From facilitating efficient resource allocation to improving the quality of project deliverables, optimizing resource utilization, and preventing resource clashes, a resource matrix can help in many ways.
By outlining which resources are needed for completing a project, a resource matrix encourages realistic project planning that looks at:
By doing so, it helps you enlist relevant project resources.
It's not enough that someone has the correct skills for the tasks at hand - they need to actually have the time spare to work on them.
Because a resource matrix reviews both the expertise needed to meet a project’s objectives and the proposed resources’ availability, this tool therefore helps resource managers find the "sweet spot" - people who are qualified to do the work, but also have capacity.
Such a well-researched approach makes sure employees aren’t overloaded with work and are actually available to take on new tasks on top of their prevailing workload. Hence, it helps with efficient workload distribution and preventing resource clashes.
By ensuring employees aren’t overloaded with work and are only assigned work based on their skills and experience, a resource matrix assists in improving resource allocation.
Effective resource allocation, in turn, enhances the quality of project deliverables (as people with the right skills are producing the deliverables).
Not to mention, with employees working on projects that are right up their alley or in the direction they want to improve, using a resource matrix also helps you contribute to increased employee engagement.
With a resource matrix, managers can share a better idea of what work is coming their team members’ way.
By planning and requesting resources based on not just employees’ skills but also their interests and specialisms, you can encourage learning and development. This improves employee engagement further.
Before you begin, review project objectives and client expectations so you can break down the project and its requirements, and assign resources accordingly.
Want some advice on the fundamentals of project planning? Here's what twenty different project management experts had to say on the topic ➡️
When you have clarity on the work scope and the project success criteria, break down the project into phases, deliverables, and tasks.
Practically, this means you need to first determine the deliverables, and then break each down by tasks. Once you have the deliverables and groups of specific tasks that come under them ready, bucket deliverables under phases.
For example, in phase 1 of a social media campaign, your deliverables are going to be an audit of your social channels, a competitor analysis, and a proposed strategy to move forward.
Now under each of these example deliverables, you’ll have tasks. For the first deliverable of an audit, for example, you could’ve tasks like identifying and reviewing engagement tasks for each social channel.
Next, determine how long each project deliverable and phase would take.
An effective approach here is to review your past project data for benchmark estimates of how long specific deliverables take to complete.
The end goal here is to create a work schedule including project start and end dates, punctuated by milestone completion dates.
This is an important step that’ll help you identify when and for how long you’ll need each project resource.
Overall, your resource matrix will now include an accompanying project timeline. Or, you can add the estimated time frames besides each project phase or deliverable:
Next, outline resource requirements against each deliverable.
Review the skills you’ll need and the required experience (seniority, for example). In doing so, your resource matrix will now include a resource required tab beside each deliverable:
Now is where you review which resources have the skills and experiences you need and if they have the availability during the time you’ve mapped your project against.
If you use a skills inventory listing employees’ skills, experience, and seniority level, it should be fairly easy to find the right people in terms of the abilities they could bring to your project.
Learn more: What is a Skills Inventory? ➡️
Whether of not they have the time to join the project is a different matter. If your organization is small, you could check with their team leads. However, by far the easiest way to check resource availability is to use resource management tools that give you one centralized place to manage resource bookings - and see what the road ahead looks like in terms of ongoing and future workload.
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This way, you can avoid requesting a resource who is already overallocated and unable to dedicate any time to additional projects.
You could continue with the document you’ve been working on or create a fresh table that lists out resources in one column and a project task in another.
This will be the simplistic version of your draft that you can share with the resource manager or other relevant stakeholders for approval.
Our final set of tips is specifically for large and complex projects requiring multiple resources or when you’re planning multiple projects. In this case, keep the following tips in mind:
Want to dig deeper into resource management? This comprehensive guide is for you ➡️
