Solving the challenges of work allocation puts you on the path to smooth project progress, happy teams, and high-quality deliverables.
On the surface, work allocation looks a bit like solving a basic mathematical exercise.
There's an amount of work that needs to be done. It needs to happen by a certain time. And there are a number of people who are available (intermittently) to work on it.
Simple enough, right? Just match the work with the people who have time available - surely?
In truth, work allocation is a lot more than what it seems. It is not as straightforward as finding blank space on the team's calendar and filling it up with assignments.
Resource managers need to consider various factors like capacity, availability, skills, seniority, their teams' preferences and development goals. Only then can really get a 360° view and make allocations to the right people at the right time.
And considering just how many factors are at play here, there's a lot that goes into making the right decisions.
Work allocation refers to the process of distributing tasks and responsibilities among the relevant individuals in your teams. It involves identifying the skills, strengths, and current workloads of employees to ensure that tasks are assigned effectively.
The goal of work allocation is to optimize the use of available resources, improve efficiency, and ensure that projects are completed on time and to a high standard.
Efficient work allocation is key for effective project management, as it helps you achieve project success without overstraining your resources or overstretching your budget.
Smart work allocation is all about that "less is more" mindset. It helps you spot opportunities to maximize the potential of your existing resources, and avoid having employees sitting on bench, waiting for assignments.
It is about the type of work planning where everyone has the clarity and visibility they need to deliver their part of the project on time. Managers can see what's coming down the line, and team members can be confident that they won't face any nasty surprises - like random reassignments, or unplanned overtime.
By ensuring that tasks are assigned appropriately, taking into account individual strengths and workload capacity, team members can perform more efficiently and with greater focus.
This alignment reduces the likelihood of burnout and decreases the time that team members spend on tasks that do not align with their skills.
As a result, they can get their work done more effectively - leading to higher overall productivity, and reducing the need for stressful troubleshooting, revisions and reworking.
It would be easy to resource your projects if you could just hire a fleet of people. But unless you want to blow through the project budget, you need to be clever and creative to find optimal project staffing solutions instead of just hiring more people.
Effective work allocation allows you to get the work done on time without needing to rely on external resources or last-minute hires.
In turn, this means that you're far more likely to complete projects without going over budget.
Further reading ➡️ delve into the many reasons why projects go over budget.
Ideally, you want to always have just the right number of people with the right skills available to assign to any new project initiative. In reality, it's rarely that simple.
There will always be a lot of challenges complicating the journey, and the goal of a good work allocation process is to find solutions to them on the go.
Whatever project you have on the table, you are likely to run into the following challenges.
If you have a single pool of resources working on a few projects at the same time, chances are high there will be issues with limited capacity and availability. This is why it is so important to have a visual representation of the resource data in front of your face at all times — to be able to see where the risks and problems are likely to arise.
But a lack of resources doesn't mean it's game over. In fact, there are lots of resource optimization techniques, like resource leveling and resource smoothing, which will help you make it work despite resource constraints.
Further reading ➡️ Resource Planning for Multiple Projects
94% of service professionals say they work more than 50 hours per week - so this is a challenge that you should actively anticipate and take proactive measures to avoid.
Creating a non-stop crisis mode for your team by allocating too much work for them is a path to burning them out, lowering their productivity and motivation through stress and illness, and ultimately losing team members to high employee turnover.
But, at the same time, underutilization is a financial risk for the business - usually, it means that not enough work is coming through the door.
Ideally, you want to find a balance between allocating too much work to your team, and allocating not enough.
Even when you are done allocating work and everything looks picture perfect, that doesn't mean things will stay that way throughout the whole duration of the project.
Unless the project was scoped out and planned spotlessly from day one (and when does that happen?), some amount of project scope creep is almost inevitable.
This is a challenge because, simply, it means that more work has been created, which also needs to get done. However, if you build a bit of buffer into your work allocation plan from the very beginning (i.e. you don't book 100% of your team's time from the start), it is easier to absorb a degree of scope change.
Availability and capacity are one thing when you allocate resources, but there are also other essential things to consider, like skills and seniority. It's not uncommon to have people who are available to join project, but they don't have the ideal mix skills you are looking for to set that project up for success.
To tackle this challenge, it's good to have a skills inventory where you can track the talents and capabilities you have within your organization.
Read on: A Beginner's Guide to Skills Tracking ➡️
Here are some tried and tested strategies on how to allocate resources to equip your projects for success:
Considering the continuously shifting nature of project-based work, it's good to try and predict what your resource availability is going to be like in the coming week, month, quarter, or even year. Effective resource allocation means remaining agile and dynamic.
This is why it is so important for your resources to fill their timesheets and update their availability — so you can have a realistic view of their capacity, make forecasts based on past data, and you come to informed decisions when planning workloads.
Learn more about How to Create a Utilization Forecast ➡️
As we have already pointed out, allocating balanced workloads to your team members is a vital aim of resource allocation. Under- or overallocation both bring negative consequences.
Ideally, you should aim for a utilization rate of 80% - meaning that 80% of their time should be dedicated to billable client work or project work. This will give them just the right amount of breathing space to take breaks, do their admin work, and absorb some scope creep, while also dedicating plenty of time to project assignments.
People want to do meaningful work - the kind of work that inspires them and gives them a sense of purpose, direction, and fulfilment.
Meaningful work has a proven positive impact on overall physical and psychological well-being, as well as productivity and morale.
But how can we create environments where work has more purpose and meaning? Well, one avenue where resource management can enable this is through a focus on learning and skills development.
Get to know the resources you manage - understand their goals and preferences. Create development plans for people, and look out for opportunities to assign them tasks or projects that will challenge them in the areas they want to improve and grow.
What happens if your Project Lead becomes seriously unwell and has to take several months away from work to recover? Or if your most senior developer gets poached by a competitor?
Resource management is unpredictable; understanding and managing risks comes with the territory.
One effective method of understanding how various risks could impact your projects is scenario planning - a strategic management process that helps anticipate the impact of different situations on everything from the project delivery timeline to budget and resource availability.
In Runn, for instance, you can play with different project scenarios and observe the theoretical outcome on resource capacity. This can help you identify if, for instance, you need to hire contractors or other temporary resources in order to accomodate for additional work that needs to be done.
Investing in a resource allocation tool is a decision that really starts to make sense when you are dealing with multiple resources and multiple projects at the same time.
At some stage, there are just so many complex dependencies, variables, and touchpoints that there is no way you can keep up with everything if operations are done manually.
With the right toolbox, however, you can have all the relevant data updated in real time. And you can forget about starting things from scratch every time — a good resource allocation tool will help you make templates using previous successes to save you time on planning new initiatives.
Let's take a closer look at this below.
Depending on the nature of your business and projects, requirements, and goals, you can consider these types of resource allocation tools:
If you are looking to efficiently allocate work, this is your group. These tools will make it easy to match the right people to the right projects at the right time.
And if you operate in the software development space and deal with multiple projects at the same time, Runn is your best-in-breed. It ensures visibility, transparency, and clarity in all things that go into resource allocation. It will declutter your workspace and give you one centralized space to manage people, projects, and budget.
If your work allocation is happening on a smaller, less complex scale and your main goal is to register hours and invoice customers for billable work, a simple time tracking and timesheeting tool might be the best fit for you.
Where work allocation (or resource management) is just one of the things to focus on, there are more higher-level tools like you can use. These are great at mapping out complex task dependencies, but might not have the ability to show you the impact of changing project scopes on resource workloads and capacity, specifically.
Work allocation can sound difficult but with the right resource allocation strategy and tailored toolstack is doesn't have to be.
As always with finding the right tools for the job, you need to know what features matter most to you, and to try out lots of different options to find your favorite. Take a look at our Buyer's Guide to Resource Management Software if you need a little guidance on how to get started.
