How do you explain the value of resource management to people who aren't familiar with it? Meet these resource management advocates, who have the answer.
Explaining the value of resource management to folks in different disciplines is a perennial challenge for the profession.
Get it right and you’ll get buy-in that brings results. But get it wrong, and you’ll face an uphill battle to implement your strategy.
It’s a problem our panel of webinar experts knows all too well. Pitching resource management’s value to an unaware organization is a right of passage for any resourcing leader.
Luckily – though they may not have worn them on screen – our panelists have been there, done that, and got the t-shirts.
The last 12 months of our webinar series are peppered with insights you can use to articulate the value of resource management and build an undeniable business case.
And to save you listening to 12+ hours of webinar wonderfulness (though you’d really enjoy it) we’ve compiled their top tips here.
Ask anyone why resource management is valuable and – if they don’t just stare at you blankly and question your small talk prowess – they’ll probably say improving operational efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
Traditionally, resource management has been viewed through an operational lens – focused on increasing resource utilization, output, and billable hours day-to-day – but that’s only part of the picture.
Today, businesses are getting wise to the strategic value of resource management – one that plays a much bigger role in boosting business success. It’s not just about allocations anymore, but how workforce strategies can drive growth, stability, and competitive advantage.
Plus, the old ‘operational efficiency’ argument also misses a key tenet of modern resource management – that the resources being managed are people. And simply trying to squeeze as much out of them as possible is counterproductive.
A key value of modern resource management is helping businesses shift from an input-output mindset, to one that recognizes human resources are human beings.
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,’ explains Nicole Tiefensee, co-founder and COO at Runn.
Resource managers help businesses create the people-positive employee experience needed for people to do their best work – and for businesses to maximize their potential, not just their productivity. One where workloads are balanced, employee preferences are observed, passions are put to use, and development opportunities abound.
Ultimately, resource management embodies the idea that when people thrive, the business thrives – and it provides the people, processes, and technology to make sure that happens.
The value proposition of resource management can’t be summed up in a few points. But here are the headlines on why resource management is important:
It comes down to three core themes – finance, strategy, and employee experience – so let’s explore them next.
The financial benefits of resource management are quantifiable, undeniable, and impactful. Money talks, and you’ll find the financial benefits of resource management are a real crowd-pleaser at C-level.
If you know where to look, you should be able to find plenty of hard data on productivity gains and cost efficiencies – and use them to demonstrate the bottom-line benefit of better resource management.
It improves utilization, reduces idle time, and helps surface spare capacity your organization can profitably use. The value of this is estimated to be over a million dollars in a 300-person business.
It also reduces the unnecessary financial costs associated with high staff turnover, missed opportunities, failed projects, and avoidable icebergs. More on all of these below.
According to the Resource Management Institute, a one-point increase in utilization creates over £1 million additional revenue in a 300-person business. That's a mic drop moment for resource management professionals, as Laura Dean-Smith, RMO Director at Clarivate, explains.
When I presented the figures for our organization to our Senior VP, it was eye-opening. He keeps a close eye on utilization rates now.'
Demonstrating that financial impact is…well…impactful at senior levels. But it doesn’t just help make the business case for resource management as a discipline.
In a professional services setting, where most employees have billable hours, it also justifies investment in non-billable staff. Resource managers may not be chargeable to clients, but they still boost profits.
It gave a financial justification for introducing non-billable roles. It showed that while the RMO isn’t directly generating revenue, it has a direct, positive impact on revenue,’ says Laura.
Aside from improving utilization and making projects more profitable, what other financial benefits can you point to when you’re building your business case for better resource management? Our experts have a few ideas.
Yes, it is possible to surface enough spare capacity that you can take on more projects. With a clearer understanding of resource availability, your organization can confidently take on more work, leading to revenue growth without proportional cost increases.
By centralizing our resource management operations, we reduced redundancy and ensured that every team was operating at optimal capacity. This led to improved project delivery times and had a direct impact on our revenue streams, as we could now respond more agilely to client demands,’ says Laura Dean-Smith.
Hear more from Laura on our webinar about starting a resource management function ➡️
Resource management data lets you monitor the accuracy of your project forecasting. How did your actual costs compare to expectations? Did you run over or under schedule? Did you have the right number and type of resources?
These insights can help you improve future forecasts, so you can quote more accurately. This is especially important for fixed-price projects where forecasting errors can eat into profit margins. More accurate forecasting also gives you more confidence in your scheduling and the ability to pursue additional work.
Sometimes service businesses think they’re at full capacity when they’re not. So they go out to market to hire external staff, or to bring in contingent workers to bridge a gap.
Resource management practices and platforms allow organizations to surface spare capacity they didn’t know they had. This can reduce the need to hire and make better use of people already on the payroll, explains Martha Arias, in our webinar on resource management mistakes to avoid.
We have a centralized pool of resources and sometimes we'll have internal departments ask for resources, instead of hiring externally. So we look at that as a cost savings and offset.’
Better resource management ensures that you can assign the right level of resource to different projects – because you have better visibility into staff capabilities and costs – which helps balance required project outcomes against the project budget.
This prevents overservicing projects by assigning overly senior staff. You can quantify the actual cost of assigning the wrong people to a project by looking at their billable rate, and show how much the project would have saved with a more accurate allocation approach.
On the flipside, it also reduces the risk of expensive reworks if you assign staff that are too junior. Having appropriately skilled people on your projects helps you hit quality goals without overspending. It’s all about balance. And resource management tools and data will help you find it.
Another stone-cold saving is on overtime. By surfacing spare capacity and creating more balanced workloads across teams, you’re less likely to have to pay people to work more than their contracted hours. Or worse, make them hate you by expecting unpaid extra work (we’re looking at you ‘crunch time’). Or burning them out to the point they get sick or need to quit.
And let’s not forget the cost of staff turnover if they do finally decide enough is enough. When making your business case for resource management, don’t forget to talk about the high cost of turnover, which is estimated to be $1500 for hourly workers and up to 150% of the salary for technical positions.
Savvy service businesses are increasingly recognizing that resource management is not just an operational function. Its strategic value is equally — if not more — important.
Strategic resource management:
Let’s see what our experts have to say on the strategic value of resource management.
Unlike a lot of other functions where there is a very narrow scope,’ says Tim Copeland, co-founder and CEO of Runn, ‘The goals of the resource management function ARE the goals of the organization. Resource management facilitates the entirety of the organization’s goals.’
Christine Robinson, former Managing Director of Resource Management at Baker Tilly US, agrees. Knowing what your business hopes to achieve, resource managers can make sure you have the capacity, capabilities, and engaged workforce to make it a reality:
Resource management is not about the success of resource management. It's about how to help the organization be successful through a strong resource management platform. It's not staffing. It's not scheduling. Quite frankly, that is the least strategic part. It’s that strategic opportunity to understand how the organization plans to evolve and what your organizational goals are.’
From here, resource professionals can understand the number and type of resources needed, how current supply matches demand, and what you need to do about it to achieve your strategy.
For example, utilization and availability data can inform capacity planning. Does your talent supply meet projected demand? If not, your HR team can implement timely recruitment and upskilling initiatives to secure more talent and plug skills gaps.
Are you stuck in a cycle of reactive hiring and firing because you don’t know who you need? Resource management data can spot trends in demand, flag redundancies, and predict recruitment trends in time to make better staffing decisions and save money.
Of course, it isn’t just about how many staff you have, but how well you use them, and how motivated they are. Resource managers can dive into data like staff satisfaction surveys, productivity metrics, turnover rates, and your employer net promoter score (eNPS) to understand employee sentiment – and implement improvements if needed.
Plus they can use their personal relationships with individuals to understand their motivations and connect them with more meaningful work – something proven to create intrinsic motivation and higher employee engagement. Think how powerful that is across your entire workforce.
A centralized resource management function provides a formal channel for aligning staffing strategies with the ambitions of the business.
It bridges the gap between HR and operations, ensuring that recruitment, retention, training, employee experience, staff wellbeing, work-life balance initiatives, role design, capacity planning, project prioritization, staff deployment – and more – are optimized to create business success.
Resource management is the organization-within-the-organization that connects all of the different pieces. It partners the revenue and financial reporting with the daily work that needs to be accomplished, while also considering the employee engagement aspect,’ says Laura Dean-Smith, 'When done effectively, it acts as a hub-and-spoke model, centralizing the function so that all parts of the business are aligned. This connection fosters collaboration across teams, ensuring that resources are allocated in a way that drives not just efficiency, but also collective success.’
Resource management is valuable because it helps senior leaders balance those competing needs and work out the more beneficial strategies for the business.
‘It all comes back to that holistic view,’ says Gary Ward, ‘If you're talking to the people team leader, the consideration is your talent supply chain, retention, engagement, skills, career mobility, etc. If you're speaking to someone with a financial lens, they may be drilling into utilization. And then someone that's more operational will be interested in process…’
Learn more about what the C-Suite want to see from resource management ➡️
Visibility is one of the biggest things the C-suite is looking for,' says Gary Ward.
Data is key to making better decisions. And, boy, can resource management provide.
A resource management system collects multi-angle data on everything from individual timesheets and workload, to schedule adherence and earned value, and lots in between.
This allows for analytics and actionable reporting on every aspect of project and people performance. And what you monitor, you can manage.
Without a centralized resource management overview, organizations are adrift – held by siloed data, poor sightlines, and inconsistent data collection. Key insights are inaccessible, leaving you unable to answer crucial questions such as:
Decisions are based on an incomplete picture or out-of-date information. Or even educated guesswork and internal politics. And that’s no way to run a business.
But with centralized resource management, the C-suite can see everything they need to make confident, data-based decisions and achieve more strategic outcomes, allowing you to:
Once you’ve got information, you can have much more intelligent conversations,’ says Tim Copeland. ‘If you don’t have that shared view of supply and demand, it’s just the loudest voice in the room that wins, and that’s never a good way to build a healthy company.’
Lean into the value prop of resource management as a strategic advisor and you’ll truly elevate your status in the organization.
A centralized resource management function provides a bird’s-eye view of how resourcing impacts business success. Think of it as the lookout in the crow's nest of a sailing boat – scanning the horizon, spotting icebergs, and helping steer the ship to safety.
‘You never want to be in a situation where there's an iceberg in the distance and you didn't see it coming,’ says Christine Robinson in our Resourcing for Success: Best Practices Every Manager Should Know webinar.
Certain things are unavoidable. But if you have information – even if it's the most basic information around, say, scheduling three months into the future – making decisions based on that information is going to help the organization be successful.’
Bend or break. That’s the rule. And it’s so true in professional services.
Market conditions, client needs, and the competitive landscape are in constant flux. So businesses need to be agile.
The availability of resource management data – along with tools such as scenario planning – helps organizations respond to changing conditions and pivot with confidence. It’s about quickly assessing options and understanding their implications – while competitors experience doubt and delay.
The C-suite needs to react to the changes in the market. And because you built trust through the transparency of your workforce and resource capacity data, they can come to you. They can say “I need to react and change these things and roll something out”, and you can explain what’s feasible, what’s not feasible, and what’s the right timeline.’
Plus, resource management doesn’t have to be reactive. With a laser focus on stats, they can identify opportunities too.
A resource management office has so much data and they’re looking at it so regularly that when you start digging around, you sometimes you spot things you're not even looking for,’ says Gary Ward. ‘It’s about being able to say “Hey, there's an opportunity here” and being able to articulate what the what the downstream effects are of that.’
Learn more: The Role of the Resource Management Office ➡️
The employee experience is perhaps the least recognized value of resource management.
This is our pet passion at Runn – how resource management can create more people-positive workplaces.
And it looks like we’re not the only ones. We’re onboarding more and more like-minded organizations that want to focus on the human side of human resources – by creating more balanced workloads, protecting their well-being, and connecting them with more meaningful work.
Here’s how proper resource management builds an employee experience that is strategically and financially beneficial to your business.
We’ve talked about reducing burnout and turnover in the financial benefits section, so we won’t labor the point. But a healthy team with high employee satisfaction reduces costs and reputational risk. And being a great place to work makes it easier to attract, recruit, and retain great staff. It’s a no-brainer.
Centralized resource management makes it much easier to spot when resources are being overbooked and overworked – and prevent burnout.
When you move to a centralized tool, you see the same resource has been booked by three different project managers. You can resolve that quickly when resource management is a more holistic function across the organization,’ says Tim Copeland.
It doesn’t matter how well your staff structure matches your ambitions if your people are disengaged and unproductive. According to Gallup in May 2024, only 32% of US workers are engaged – it’s a huge problem. Resource management helps increase employee engagement by:
Understanding what truly motivates people on an intrinsic level is essential,’ explains Tim Copeland. ‘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. And you spend less time managing and motivating them.’
Laura Dean-Smith agrees:
At the heart of resource management is the idea of partnership and collaboration. When employees feel supported in their roles and understand that their strengths are being utilized, it significantly boosts their job satisfaction and engagement. My mission has always been to ensure that every team member feels a sense of connection to the work they’re doing, as this not only enhances their individual experience but also contributes to the overall success of the organization.’
This doesn’t just drive staff performance and satisfaction, but client satisfaction too, as they benefit from your highly skilled and motivated team. This is all great from your brand – both as a service provider and as an employer of choice for top talent.
‘You want people to stay in the business,’ says David Edwards, head of workforce planning at Ericsson, in our webinar on measuring success in resource management.
Employees are more likely to stay with an organization that cares for their well-being, provides work that challenges and develops them, and respects their preferences.
And that’s great for business because staff retention:
Resource management helps businesses create more opportunities for people to grow, and to learn, and become the different kinds of people that we need them to be,’ says David.
Resource managers can be instrumental in matching people to opportunities that meet their professional development needs and future vacancies in the business – known as succession planning.
By strategically allocating resources to relevant projects and challenges, businesses can prepare the next generation of leaders, ensuring continuity and a smooth transition when key people leave or retire.
We know that’s a lot to digest so here are the key takeaways to help you explain the value of resource management.
To hear more about the value of resource management from the horses’ mouths – no offense intended to our experts – watch our webinars on-demand ➡️
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