Savvy organizations are prioritizing resource management - and reaping the benefits.
Between rising inflation and poor economic circumstances, investing in resource management can seem like an unnecessary luxury - or certainly something you can deprioritize for the time being.
Except, that’s not really true.
Because managing resources effectively helps organizations save more, prevent resource wastage, reduce employee turnover, and increase customer satisfaction among other benefits.
These benefits barely scratch the surface on why organizations are prioritizing resource management, though. Efficient resource management plays a helping hand in many more areas, including:
Resource management has been around for quite some time now.
However, the present economic doldrums, the great resignation, and rise of remote work are some factors encouraging investment in it currently. You’ll learn how as you dig in below:
94% of respondents in a Deloitte survey say they’d appreciate work flexibility. This preference comes off the back of growth in remote work and the gig economy.
Runn’s CEO and Founder, Tim Copeland notes:
If you think back to the olden days — before the post-pandemic revolution in how we work — everyone would be present in a physical office and they’d work from nine to five. And it was easier to manage those resources because they were very predictable.
Nowadays, understanding the capacity of your workforce is harder. Employees expect accessibility around hours. They expect to be able to take time off, work flexibly, have part-time hours, define the hours they want to work… That’s an absolute baseline expectation that didn’t exist before."
These changing expectations call for “building systems that can elegantly scale with that level of flexibility — and still give the right answers around capacity.”
The solution? Resource management.
Efficient resource management gives you a holistic overview of employees’ skills, availability, and interest. This means you can allocate resources to projects based on their availability, skillset, and experience — honoring their request for flexibility.
But wait, there’s more.
Resource management helps you keep a pulse on employee capacity — showing you which employees are due an off, by when, and which ones have been working without a break.
To boot, by careful capacity utilization, thoughtfully allocating resources helps further by keeping workforce burnout at bay.
“In the current economic climate, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what work is gonna go ahead, when, what the scope of work will be. There are a lot of things in flux for project planning,” Tim points out.
This lack of predictability is fanning the need for carefully understanding and balancing capacity and demand.
I think one of the challenges for business in the future is deciding what you want to be. Do you want to be a business that’s very good at reacting to things that happen to you? Or really good at planning and making things happen for you?
To be really good at planning, which is definitely the better state to be in, you need to have a reliable long-term forecast. And the ability to deal with inherent volatility along the way. You need to be able to see it all. And that's been very difficult for most companies in the past.”
Resource management gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s in your pipeline and your workforce’s present and future capacity.
This, in turn, helps you better plan current and future workload with available employee capacity. In fact, an advanced resource management software gives you comprehensive project reports, showing forecasts of how much revenue, profit, and costs your projects incur.
It also makes it easy for you to plan for what-ifs scenarios (that is: you can see the impact of pipeline changes on your capacity and utilization rate).
Latest research reveals that 85% of the world’s population are living under austerity measures as of 2023. The trend is expected to continue until at least 2025, confirming how growing inflation is impacting the globe.
In Tim’s words:
Money is very expensive, so people are a lot more expensive now than they used to be. Businesses need to be very careful about how they’re spending their money and how they’re asking employees to focus their time and energy.”
The good news? Strategic resource planning helps manage resources and prevent wastage.
It helps in a number of ways:
This goes without saying but the leading challenge that organizations are struggling with today is meeting demand with limited resources.
The root cause? Budget cuts and layoffs.
The solution lies in making the most of the available talent - technically referred to as resourcefulness. Achieving it is a chief reason why you should be prioritizing resource management.
A smart resource management strategy fosters effective workload distribution, optimal utilization, and innovation. Here’s how:
Lack of visibility into available talent and their availability is another main challenge organizations struggle with today. Often, it’s a challenge that doesn’t make itself apparent — making it hard to realize you need visibility in the first place.
Essentially, companies do have information on employee availability and related trends, except it’s locked away. This lack of accessibility prevents teams from using the data for improving resource allocation and utilization-related decision-making.
Resource management centralizes all information related to employees including their skills, professional development goals, interests, experience, and availability.
Naturally, this enhances visibility into vital data and encourages data-informed resource allocation. It also promotes integrated planning and cross-team collaboration making it easy to bring together people from different departments to work on specific projects.
Not to mention, resource management simplifies employee utilization. For example, you can track both planned utilization and review actual utilization in your resource management platform — without having to do any manual work:
It’s easy to turn down or deprioritize hiring requests that don’t have substantial data explaining the need - so, if you want your hiring requests to be taken seriously, you need to be able to show why the additional resource is necessary.
To add, squeezed budgets mean hiring based on assumptions doesn’t work anymore. Instead, organizations need to better funnel their budget to hiring as needed.
Effective resource management shows you skills and competency gaps in your current workforce. Thanks to in-depth skills inventories, businesses can easily identify areas of where additional expertise is needed to meet current and future business goals.
What’s more, utilization data and pipeline planning give you insights into demand and supply — showing you how packed employees are and if there’s really a new for new full-time hires.
Efficient forecasting helps with this further. By showing you upcoming demand, you can settle on whether to hire new people or work with contractors based on fluctuations in demand.
Resource management is your answer to growing revenue amid budget cuts and poor economic circumstances. It helps by:
Considering investing in managing resources effectively? Here’s an in-depth guide to getting buy-in from your stakeholders/partners.
