All organizations have resources to manage; you need a good process to do it well. Let's walk through the essential stages of resource planning.
If you have resources — people, machines, tools — your company needs to do resource planning.
You may know the process of managing your resources by a different name, but all organizations do it in some capacity. What sets them apart is the efficacy of their processes.
If you’re looking to improve your approach to allocating people to projects, better plan people’s time, or increase your company's rates of project success, keep reading. In this article, we're breaking down the five steps of effective resource planning.
Resource planning is about getting the right people doing the right tasks on projects at the right time. It involves matching people to project tasks according to their availability, capacity, skills, and cost — so you can deliver profitable projects on time and on budget.
Resource planning matters because, when resources are in short supply and demand is high, it’s important to make sure you’re being conscientious about how you spend your people’s time and money.
Dive deeper ➡️ What is Resource Planning? The Beginner's Guide
.png)
Ready to start optimizing your resource planning process? By following these five steps, you can gain a better understanding of your company’s upcoming projects and your resource availability.
The end result? An optimized approach to resource planning, improved utilization rates, reduced risk of burnout, and better outcomes for clients and stakeholders.
‘Strategizing’ is more of a 0.5 stage, really, as it covers the prep work that must be done before you can dive into resource planning properly. As we all know, preparation is the key to success.
Before you can begin assigning people to projects, you need to take the time to evaluate your project pipeline, answering several questions that will inform your resource management decisions:
The goal is to ensure that you’re informed about all upcoming and potential projects and what resources you have access to.
Once you’ve noted the upcoming and planned projects in the pipeline, it’s essential to comb through the needs and expectations of the key stakeholders, including project managers, executive sponsors, and external clients.
This involves working with the project team to understand the project’s scope, objectives, and timelines, as well as the roles and skills that are essential to the project's success.
Beginning the resource planning process well in advance of project kick-off means you have adequate time to assess priorities and strategically match resources to future projects.
Ask questions like:
For example, some projects will require specialized skills or advanced experience levels, while others require a specific team member’s involvement due to their knowledge of the client. This strategic consideration is essential to maximizing value across the board.
Remember to build buffers into your project schedule. If you don’t leave a little wiggle room to accommodate the unexpected, one small schedule slip can cause major disruptions.
Learn more ➡️ Best Practices for Requirements Gathering in Project Management
Once you’ve got a clear understanding of the project pipeline, project priorities, and resource requirements, it’s time to allocate resources to project work.
This is where the real resource planning magic happens; as a resource manager, you’re responsible for identifying which team members are best equipped to complete the project work.
As you’ve already identified the criteria of all the resources needed, the next step is to match resources to projects and project tasks based on each person's unique skills and experience. This stage can be further divided into three steps.
Equipped with a detailed understanding of project needs and timeframes, you can begin to identify suitable resources for the work. This is important to support healthy resource utilization while ensuring project managers have access to the right mix of skills and experience.
Consider the following factors:
In more advanced practice, you may also consider the interests and career ambitions of resources, to match them to projects that will engage and develop them. But that’s next-level thinking. Let’s nail the basics first.
Having identified your dream team, you need to secure them. There are two ways to do this, as managers can either assign or request resources.
When project managers assign resources, they can allocate the resources based on the frameworks and priorities established for the project. Project managers assess resource availability, assign the right team members to the project tasks, and schedule them based on the project’s requirements. No formal approval is required.
In other organizations, resources are allocated through a more formal process. Project managers need to request the necessary resources through a standardized process, typically via a resource manager or centralized resource planning office. This helps ensure resources are allocated efficiently, according to organizational priorities, and that no single project unfairly monopolizes top talent.
Once you’ve secured your resources by one of the methods above, you need to schedule them. This means assigning them to specific tasks within the project – and making sure other people know you’ve booked them. You can either do this manually or with the support of dedicated resource planning software.
Resource planning is an ongoing process. Once a project is in progress, your focus should be on managing resources in real-time — and creating alternative plans when necessary.
Advanced resource planning is critical, but the reality is that things rarely go according to plan. While you should always aim to be proactive in anticipating resource conflicts ahead of time, you need to be ready to react to changes as they happen. Here are some examples of challenges you may face:
We suggest keeping in regular contact with your team members and project managers to keep your resource management process working smoothly, even once projects are underway.
The work isn't done once a project has been successfully delivered. Now, it's time to review how accurate your initial plan was, comparing it to how the resources were actually used.
From reviewing the accuracy of your forecasting to understanding what external factors are most likely to affect your plans, there are lots of ways you can use complete project data to review and improve the efficacy of your resource planning processes.
Here are some metrics to benchmark at the start of your resource planning transformation – and to keep checking to monitor your success:
Keep reading ➡️ Why Resource Utilization Should Be Part of Your KPIs
But this becomes impossible when you don't have access to accurate real-time data on how your resources' time has been used. That's why you need a resource management tool capable of capturing project information, usage data, and more. More on that in a moment.
Now that you understand how to implement the five steps of resource planning, let’s dive into the best practices that’ll go a long way to improving project outcomes
If you want to succeed in resource planning, you need to get your company’s leadership fully onside. That means helping them understand the benefits of resource planning, including how it’ll help them hit their strategic project goals. Think better project outcomes, reduced turnover, and more!
Unless you’re very fortunate, you have limited resources available to you. You need to deploy them on the highest-impact initiatives.
When it comes to resource planning for multiple projects, there are several ways you help your project managers balance their resources better:
Once you’ve identified which projects best serve the organization’s strategy, you can prioritize their importance, and allocate resources accordingly – matching high-priority projects with the right talent. And, perhaps just as importantly, you can push back on projects that simply aren’t as important as people think.
Successful resource planning isn’t conducted in isolation. One way to involve your project managers in the process is to host regular resource planning meetings.
This gives everyone an opportunity to communicate their resourcing needs or raise concerns, allowing changes to be made well ahead of time. This will help mitigate risks and prevent resource conflicts. For example, if two project managers request the same software engineer over the same period, you can take the time to assess each project’s needs and make a strategic decision on which project to assign them to.
We recommend putting a regular time in the diary to review resources so that resource management remains at the top of everyone’s priority list. This is especially beneficial if your organization is large, with more than 50 complex projects running concurrently.
Further reading ➡️ How to Nail a Resource Planning Meeting.
Creating a resource management plan is essential, as it helps ensure each project has access to the resources it needs. Key steps include identifying the required support, informing resource acquisition, and re-allocating the resource once it's no longer needed.
Sure, you can do your resource planning in Excel, but why would you when there are countless alternatives available?
Spreadsheets are incredibly useful when it comes to conducting data analysis, but they’re not designed for resource planning and forecasting. Not only are they overly complex, but they can’t be integrated with your other systems, like planning, time-tracking, and HR tools.
Plus, they’re not flexible enough to offer all the features you need to manage resources successfully — especially compared to the alternatives, like a resource planning tool.
Between spreadsheets, notepads, and emails, there are many ways to complete resource planning activities without purpose-built software — but there are limits to what you can achieve.
If you want to build a truly strategic approach to resource planning, you need to integrate resource planning software into your processes.
Why? Well, the best resource planning tools are specifically designed to support project resource management, offering all the features you need to strategically plan and optimize your project resources.
This includes streamlining planning tasks like finding and allocating resources, integrating with other software, like human resources and time-tracking tools, and visualizing project data.
Runn makes resource planning easier than ever before. Here are just a few of the ways our intelligent resource planning software can help resource managers like you unlock the full potential of resource planning:
Book a demo with Runn today, or try our project resource planning features for free.
.avif)
