5 Key Benefits of Optimizing Your Resource Management Process

Successful businesses are finding ways to improve profitability levels, streamline costs and eliminating waste. Considering that for many organizations employee’s themselves represent a significant cost to the business, it comes as no surprise that many have used staff redundancies and lay-offs as their primary cost cutting strategy during these challenging economic times.

However, business success even in difficult times is heavily dependent on the contributions made from staff members; letting go of important skills, experience and expertise may bring short term relief, but will this loss have an adverse effect on the future performance of the business? The answer is probably yes. Perhaps there should be more focus on tightening up internal resource management processes with a view to improving overall productivity levels.

One solution to this problem is to implement a project resource management software.  The right resource management solution will help eliminate common problems associated with poor resource planning, such as a lack of visibility of who is doing what, a lack of understanding of the talent available within the organization, numerous resourcing conflicts, increased project risk, or an under or over utilization of staff.

By standardizing your resource management processes, you can improve visibility and control, which in turn can lead to significant benefits for any business.  And because, for most Professional Service Organizations (PSO), your talent represents your greatest cost but largest revenue source, the benefits are sure to affect your bottom line.

The key benefits should include:

Increased revenue – Resource Management Solutions will help you easily assess how well utilized your entire resource pool is on a daily, weekly or monthly basis,  helping to ensure your most valuable resources are used to maximum effect, and your workload is balanced to avoid sustained periods of time on the bench.

Conflict resolution – Resource conflicts can have a significant effect on revenue, at worst an unresolved resource conflict may result in an immediate missed revenue opportunity, along with a negative future impact through reduced customer satisfaction. With Resource Management Software, whenever resources are double booked, or a project plan has been rescheduled you can easily spot any conflicts and quickly resolve them.  By storing the details of your resources skills, experience and knowledge, you can quickly and efficiently identify a qualified replacement.

Improve project delivery – Improving project delivery will help reduce costs and increase margins. Research shows that organizations who have implemented a PMO have significantly reduced costs, and for Professional Services Organization, it is a common feature of the highest performers.  Resource Management Solutions enable resources to be allocated to work based on a number of specific criteria such as their availability, skills and location so you will always be sure you have the right person allocated to the right job.

In fact, by improving your resource management process you will be able to identify skills shortages and training requirements, helping to alleviate any future resourcing conflicts and there negative effects. What’ s more, Resource Management Software enables your organization to gain real time visibility into resource capability and your capacity to deliver future projects, enabling you to better manage customer expectations, whilst minimizing any adverse effects on customer satisfaction and future revenue opportunities.

Reduce administration costs – No doubts if you are utilizing a homegrown or spreadsheet based resource management system it will be prone to errors and cumbersome to use. In fact it is probably only reviewed once a week, or worse, once a month – meaning you are likely to be suffering from many of the issues we have discussed in this post! With a central, up to date view of your entire resource pool you will reduce the administration costs associated with maintaining these out of date systems. What’s more you can improve revenue, maximize fee earning potential and nurture customer relationships.  Only integrated resource management software provides this visibility, control and opportunity.

Back to Mastering Project Resource Management.