Strategy is only an idea without the right people, who can be hard to find and even harder to retain. But with the help of strategic resource management that is aligned directly with your strategic business strategies, talent can not only be acquired, but also thrive in their work and contribute enormous business value. Beyond reducing costs or saving time, a resource strategy promises to deliver better focus on customers with better trained and more productive people who are the best fit for their roles. With the right people in place for the right work at the right time, changes and challenges, whether local or global, can be met with flexibility, insight, foresight, and, most importantly, resilience. When done correctly, resource management helps companies plan for future needs, identify opportunities for growth or weaknesses, and helps achieve overall strategic goals.
Achieve Strategic Alignment with Resource Management
Resource planning ensures that you have not only forecasted your roles and skills against the project’s demands but also that you have the best fit resources assigned to the work based on their availability, supporting your business’s strategic initiatives. The key to resource management is a broader understanding of your business, not only the roles, skills, teams and people but the strategic priorities set by leadership and how the work people are doing contributes to those.
Key to achieving strategic alignment is:
- Focus on Big Picture: Many project and product managers focus on the tasks required to get the project done rather than first thinking about who will do the work and their availability. It is crucial for PMs to work with resource managers from the very first stages of planning. Resource management is the foundation of project delivery and strategy execution. Whether your goal is to innovate, drive transformation, or improve profitability in record time, your leadership must focus on the core principles of resource management to experience portfolio success. That includes a focus on better forecasting and decision making, supported by understanding your resource utilization, capacity planning, and scenario analysis.
- Size, Plan, Deliver: Project and product leaders need to be trusted to deliver on the company’s vision of the future. C-suite leaders should be communicating their strategic initiatives, 1-year, 5-year, 10-year goals, with the organization. Portfolio leaders are charged with making that vision come to life through the work that needs to be done. Project and product leaders must then work resource managers to understand the project’s demands, timeline and roles needed to complete the work.
- Making Educated Decisions with Scenario Planning: When done effectively resource management can answer all what-if questions and issues that will alter the plan. When market conditions change, decision makers need to know the impact of pausing, canceling, or delaying projects as well as starting new, now higher priority projects. Scenario planning is more than a list of hypotheticals; it’s having a strategy for how these scenarios can impact resources, teams, projects, budgets, delivery and the overall success of your strategy. To read more about creating a scenario planning strategy, read our Guide to Portfolio Success with Scenario Planning.
Optimize Resource Utilization and Efficiency
Effective resource forecasting and planning provides tangible business value in companies, enabling leaders to optimize resource utilization. By forecasting resource needs and tracking skills, organizations can ensure that their workforce is deployed efficiently across the entire organization, reducing wasted time and improving productivity.
Key factors in optimizing resource utilization are:
- Right People, Right Time: Resource management involves skillfully assigning the right people to projects to fit their experience and availability. You must also closely monitor project interdependencies to make sure work can get completed on schedule, and employees are not over-allocated or under-allocated. It’s more about optimizing allocation, not simply matching any resource to a project.
- Maximizing Opportunity for Success: By being strategic in your assignments of resources to work, and monitoring throughout the project, you can ensure that resources are not over-utilized or under-utilized, thereby maximizing productivity and chances of project success.
- Modeling Scenarios Avoid Issues: When resource needs are forecasted and tracked, and scenarios are examined to make sure you are aware of any foreseeable issues, you avoid bottlenecks, project delays and missed delivery dates.
Optimize Profitability with Workforce Planning
Workforce planning helps us most effectively utilize our people to achieve our business goals. Workforce planning helps match our supply of people (resource capacity) with our demand for people (resource allocation).
Key factors in optimizing profitability with workforce planning are:
- More Efficient Planning for Employment Decisions: With proper workforce planning, knowing what work is in the pipeline and knowing what skills or roles will be needed to complete that work helps prevents over-hiring or rushed outsourcing, especially when HR is involved in the conversation.
- Reduce Work Delays: Planning ahead reduces project delays by knowing the project demands compared to resource capacity. Having a well-established plan with timelines, assigned resources and budget already planned can help alleviate any delays.
- Focus on Value: Utilizing workforce planning helps businesses ensure resources are assigned to their high-value initiatives. While it can be tempting to enable an unlimited amount of requests for new work, workforce planning makes sure that resources are focused on those high-value initiatives that serve company goals, not projects that don’t grow the business in the long term.
Enhance Agility and Flexibility
With detailed insights into both individual and team resources, companies can pivot more quickly in response to changing business demands, regulatory shifts, or market opportunities. Resource management helps businesses enhance agility and flexibility by:
- Quick Pivots, Quick Decisions: When you have a strategy set up that focuses on resources being thoughtfully and accurately allocated, you can look at your pipeline and make quick movements to adjust for changes, whether it be fluctuations in supply chains, a key resource on leave, or market conditions that impact financial goals.
- Planning in a Multi-Methodology Environment: As organizations operate with a blend of Agile, waterfall, and hybrid methodologies, the ability to track and plan team resource capacity becomes critical. In order to understand where resource gaps are across the enterprise, planning with both individual people and Agile teams provides a view into all work demands and all capacity to fulfill them. It is easy to know a person’s availability but, when layering in teams, capacity planning becomes an afterthought. To remain flexible and agile, organizations need to focus on forecasting and capacity planning for all resource types.
TDS Solving Problems Strategically with Resource Management
Telephone and Data Systems (TDS) is a Fortune® 1,000 company that provides wireless products and services, cable and wireline broadband, TV and voice services, and hosted and managed services to approximately six million customers nationwide. Before moving to a resource management platform, TDS’s IT leadership was overseeing its resource management through Excel spreadsheets. It was a very manual and time-consuming process that left the door open for errors and inaccuracies. There were teams and resources throughout the TDS IT organization that were constrained with project work, “keep the lights on” activities, and leadership felt they had no great process to manage that workload.
TDS’s IT leadership has gained much insight into its resource forecasting and capacity planning with Tempus Resource. The team utilizes Tempus’s What-If scenario planning to allow Resource Analysts to run scenarios and plan more effectively, a key to strategic alignment. The tool provides options and answers about the ways forward and uncovers opportunities within possible disruptions. Being able to answer questions such as what happens to a project if a skilled resource is reassigned, or if budget constraints mean a project might be delayed, provides much more potential for success. Having a true resource management platform helps their team prioritize work and make strategic decisions about tradeoffs when considering various projects. By using What-If models in Tempus Resource, TDS’s team is provided with a visual representation that help them better understand how new or proposed work will impact the existing projects. “If we get a request from the business that’s rather high in priority, Tempus Resource allows us to get that project in and then we can use the What-If tool to understand quickly what we must give up or stop to do this new work,” says Daniel Neugart, IT Portfolio Resource Analyst with TDS. Additionally, Nicole Ballweg, Manager of the Project Management Office for TDS, says, “Another component that Tempus Resource has given us is the ability to plan forward. We plan our portfolio for next year more than six months in advance. I’ve seen a lot of spreadsheets that get out of sync with each other. Tempus Resource has given us the ability to not only have one model of what next year could look like, but ten depending on different variables that could be out there.”
To read more about how TDS achieves its strategic goals with resource management and a resource management platform, read the complete case study here.
Focusrite Achieves Better Planning and Forecasting with Resource Management
Focusrite, a global company that’s publicly listed in the United Kingdom, offers audio interfaces and other solutions for recording musicians, producers, podcasters, and audio professionals. Company leaders recognized the need for a resource management platform that could better assist the company with planning and forecasting. Nick Thomson, Head of Operations for Focusrite, explains, “Since we develop and design our own hardware and software products, at any point we’re trying to develop, maintain and ultimately deliver a product roadmap. Having a single source of truth for our roadmaps, stretching into the future, is something invaluable to us.” Before implementing a resource management practice, Focusrite leaders struggled to put together and maintain in a coherent way a roadmap that they could collaborate on as a team. Properly allocating resources to meet their roadmap was a big struggle as well. Thomson continues, “Being able to say with any credibility that this is what we think we can deliver with our resource pool, this is what we can’t, any number of scenarios and what-ifs – we needed all of those things, but we couldn’t do them. We were mainly utilizing spreadsheets to capture our roadmap projects, and we were trying to do some resource planning, but it wasn’t ideal.”
Focusrite realized the impact of implementing a resource management solution very quickly, as the data that Tempus Resource was able to provide helped Focusrite leaders and resource managers concentrate on resourcing issues and forecasts more easily. Thomson continues, “Tempus has had a big impact. It makes our work much less subjective. Data is not everything and we don’t only look at numbers, but Tempus Resource focuses the conversations a lot more easily. We can get away from talking in very general terms and can identify and hone in on the problem areas. We make better and faster decisions about which projects we’re going to invest in and move forward, and which ones we’re going to stop as well.”
Having implemented resource portfolio management processes has helped Focusrite leaders have a better grasp of overall resource utilization and more efficient planning and forecasting. Additionally, the ability to resource plan more efficiently and with more flexibility built into Tempus has benefited Focusrite leadership when changes to the roadmap inevitably occur. Thomson describes, “Forecasting and carving out time for planning has been really helpful, and it’s reduced the amount of time we need for ‘drop everything, urgent, firefighting’ situations because we’re preemptively setting aside some capacity.”
To learn more about how Focusrite utilizes resource forecasting and scenario planning to ensure it achieves its goals, read the complete case study here.
Resource Management Maturity Model
If resource management helps us effectively utilize our people to achieve our business goals, then there are natural stages to how this is achieved. For some organizations, it starts with simply looking ahead to how employees can be better assigned to projects. For more advanced teams, that can involve more proactive analysis of roles, responsibilities and projects 18 months to several years out for better resource forecasting and capacity planning. By following a resource management maturity model, you can assess where your organization falls in its use of true resource management, not just project management. You can also follow some clear steps to move your efforts forward and evolve into a more mature organization. To read our full resource management maturity model and how to advance your organization through the five levels, visit our PMO’s Guide to Great Resource Management.
Additional Resources
- For more information about resource management – what it means, why you need resource management, how resource management fits with project management and implementing strategy for your business, and a how to use a resource management maturity model – read our PMO’s Guide to Great Resource Management.
- Check out these blog posts to learn more about how resource management can help in these industries:
- Visit our YouTube channel for helpful tutorials about many topics on resource management, resource utilization, and specific features in Tempus Resource that can help you achieve your goals.
- Read more about how effective resource management can help your organization achieve its goals and what to look for in a resource management solution with our Buyers’ Guide for Resource Management.
- To learn more about how Tempus Resource can help with your resource management needs, see Tempus Resource in action with one of our use case-specific demos. If you would like a customized demo for your organization, you can reach out to us.
