Employee Management And The Challenges Involved In It

Using all your resources smartly is essential as it is the most expensive investment for any business. Additionally, companies invest a lot of time and money to create the right talent pool. Therefore, maximizing their skills and capabilities will increase your overall efficiency and profitability.

Resource management has become an integral part of any business today, hence work scheduling apps or resource scheduling software like eResourceScheduler helps you to have seamless employee management in place.

This blog aims to explain all the necessary concepts and provide a guide to becoming a successful resource manager by adopting the right work scheduling app.

What is Resource Management?

 It is the process of planning, scheduling, forecasting, and optimizing the entire resource lifecycle for successful project delivery. It helps unleash the maximum potential of each resource, improve business profitability, and beat market volatility.

Resource Management and its Importance

• Significantly minimizes project resource costs:

Enterprise-wide visibility enables resource managers to leverage low-cost global resources from low-cost locations. The right mix of local and global resources can reduce project costs. By allocating the right resources to the right projects, you can deliver on time and on budget.

• Improve effective/billable resource utilization:

Work Scheduling app or Resource scheduling software helps managers proactively predict employee utilization. Resources can thus be mobilized from non-billable to billable and strategic work. When resources are withdrawn from projects, they may not have suitable work to keep them busy.

• Proactively closing the gap between capacity and demand:

Demand forecasting, a feature of Project Resource Management, allows managers to anticipate resource needs in advance. Work scheduling app allows you to assess and analyze skill gaps within your existing competencies. After bottlenecks and surpluses are identified, resource managers can develop action plans to proactively close the gap between capacity and demand.

• Effective utilization of scarce resources in a matrix organization:

The resource management process brings transparency to communication and facilitates the effective sharing of highly skilled resources within the Matrix organization. Scarce resources can be used across projects instead of high-priority projects..

• Monitor and improve organizational health metrics:

Employees look up to their managers for professional development. Not providing motivation and career development opportunities primarily lead to low engagement, low productivity, and unplanned turnover. Regular monitoring of their skills and performance helps the organization improve and add value.

Let’s dive deep into the key components and concepts of resource management.

Functionalities of resource management:

 Resource planning:

It involves identifying resources for specific time periods and assigning them to various project tasks. These tasks can be billable, non-billable, or BAU work. Eliminate spreadsheet silos with resource planning by centralizing the enterprise Gantt chart view. It also makes it easier to assign qualified resources to the right tasks to complete projects on budget and on time.

 Monitoring Resource utilization:

It measures the time employees spend on various project tasks and their availability. It is a key performance indicator in the modern business environment as it directly impacts a company’s bottom line. 

Resource forecast:

Resource forecasting helps managers proactively forecast resource utilization and predict which resources are likely to end up in the bank. Additionally, you can get information about the capacity you need for your pipeline project. It helps you in Mobilizing resources for billable tasks from non-billable or BAU activities, effective bench management, and bridging the gap between capacity and demand.

Resource capacity planning:

It refers to proactively analyzing and bridging the gap between capacity and demand.

Business Intelligence and Reporting:

Business intelligence provides actionable insights by performing comprehensive data analysis. Use real-time data to generate customized reports and dashboards on key resource management metrics. 

Now we have understood the various benefits and functionalities of the work scheduling app. Let’s deep dive and understand the challenges associated with Resource management:

1. Resource risk not assessed: Many organizations only assess risk in terms of processes, technology, and/or unforeseen events. But we don’t always think about the risks associated with resources. A project manager or resource manager should make a list of all possible risks and opportunities when allocating resources.
2. Lack of sufficient qualified resources: It’s not enough to just have the resources, you must also have the skills necessary to successfully complete the project requirements and the skills that will serve the entire organization. Allocating resources without considering capacity can be a waste of time.
3. Suboptimal use of resources: Already allocated resources may not be optimized. They tend to work on low-priority projects or do the “hard work,” rather than the kind of project that aligns with the company’s goals. A project manager must be able to recognize and be aware of project deployments.
4. Schedules/deadlines are unrealistic: Unrealistic or tight deadlines are major challenges of project management. They should be avoided at all costs. It is essential for project teams to plan not only for project constraints but also for resource constraints (personal or professional).
5. Inconsistent allocation of resources: Allocating resources on a whim without analyzing upcoming requirements, understanding priorities, and considering organizational goals is dangerous. Before allocating resources, it is important to have a complete picture of incoming demand and available resource capacity according to appropriate skills and roles.
6. Too many unplanned requests for resources: In many organizations, new projects arise from time to time. Some of these projects are important and others are not in line with the organization’s goals and strategies. So the first step in resource management and planning is to understand the demand landscape, prioritize those projects, and allocate resources accordingly.
7. Shift resources to meet unexpected problems: Again, in organizations working on complex projects, unexpected problems and issues arise, and this is only natural. Even with the most efficient resource planning, unexpected challenges are always a problem. This doesn’t mean that you have to move resources around sporadically. It remains important to have a good understanding of demand and requirements, ideally using robust project management methods to create a planned response.
8. Poorly documented resource usage: When managing a project, it is important to regularly and accurately document the workload and allocation of all resources. In many organizations, this is done manually in lengthy spreadsheets, often containing the human error. For this reason, organizations with the highest project management maturity should use dedicated work scheduling apps rather than spreadsheets to document resource allocation and utilization. 
9. Poor migration process for shared resources: Shared resources working in different departments and different projects are common in project management. Shared resources often move from project to project without a proper migration process or project plan in place.

All organizations, large and small, experience these issues at some level during resource management. It can often provide the business case for an organization and build upon it to deliver real change. The key is to recognize them and respond appropriately with the right plans, the right work scheduling app, and the right people for the job.