Business and Resource Management

Effective resource management can help organizations optimize the use of people with insight into their workloads, availability, project time requirements, skills, etc. Organizations can give their business and resource managers what they need to properly and fairly allocate projects to the right resources. With Resource Management, you can achieve the following:

To make the best resource allocation, you should learn the skills and availability of your employees now and for the next six months.

To truly understand what resources are available, resource managers need easy access to a knowledge base that includes the availability, limitations, skills, and locations of all people in the company-wide repository. You can use to achieve this, which will increase the potential for resource managers to assemble the best possible team, bringing together people with different skills and experience.

Managing your pool of resources against market demand requires an ongoing review process to assess whether the business still has the right mix of skills to meet the needs of customers and prospects. This includes asking:

• Which skills are becoming valuable and which are losing relevance?
• What are the trends - where is the market headed?
• Is your organization undergoing proper training and professional development to acquire and refine skills?
• Is everyone in the organization encouraged to update the knowledge base with new experiences, skills, courses and qualifications?

You can use Resource Management to foster skills and a culture of talent development by reminding people to constantly document skills and track experience gained, which pays off when resources are allocated to projects that best fit their skill set. These practices help build and retain high-performing teams.

Another advantage of Resource Management is that it captures opportunities that are lost because the business does not have the ability to win them. This illustrates that the market may be looking for skills your organization needs to offer. The information is valuable, allowing you to analyze important skills gaps based on current market needs and trends in skills demand. Then you can use the trends to identify which skills are needed over a six-month period and create an action plan to close the expected skills gap.

The sales team is selling the resources time or output, so it is imperative that the sales and resource teams have an open line of communication. Upcoming needs will tell the resource team what skills are needed and when.

What is often overlooked is the bidirectional nature of collaboration between sales and resources. Using Resource Management, sales teams can understand resource planning and focus on areas where resources are available or underutilized. For example, if, based on current forecasts, several resources will be on the bench in two months, and no items can be moved, resource allocation could guide sales, encouraging them to aggressively sell this availability, perhaps using pricing incentives.

Using Resource Management to collaborate between sales and resource teams also helps break the common practice of assigning resources to projects only after contract documents are signed. Allocating resources at this stage alone misses the opportunity to be more proactive--deals typically reach a high level of confidence in the weeks before contracts are finalized, a time that can be used to make progress in resource allocation.

Resource managers can plan ahead and build a well-cooperative team that finds the best balance between experienced and less experienced members, which maximizes resource utilization and profits while training more junior members of the team. This also suits team members—service professionals often value working in a more planned environment where they can see the projects they might be working on.