Managing your portfolio resources without resource management software or resource scheduling tools can be a total nightmare — and that’s probably why you’re here. You know there must be a better way to manage your resources and team.
Every week, you’re busy trying to meet everyone’s crazy resourcing needs. You’ve got the half-baked resource requests, the conflicting priorities, plus contractors, 3rd parties, and freelancers too.
Trying to get a resource plan into order without some sort of resource management software is hard enough. Throw competing projects, uncertain clients, vacations, and sick leave into the mix, and you find that getting any work done on schedule begins to get tricky. First, let’s cover a few basics:
What are Resource Management and Scheduling?
Resource scheduling is an activity in resource management in which resources including staff, space, equipment, etc. are assigned to complete tasks, jobs, or projects. Usually, this process involves checking the resource’s availability, scheduling start and end dates, managing any resourcing conflicts or dependencies, and monitoring over time to adapt to changes.
What is a Resource Forecast?
Often, Resource forecasting occurs in the initial phases of any project. A resource forecast is an estimate of the resources that will be required for the project, which helps determine the project hours, project budget, and the project estimate put forward to the client.
What does Resource Scheduling Software do?
If you’re looking for a replacement for your Excel sheet and resourcing management doom, look for a tool that provides you with:
- Resource planning, scheduling, and management This allows you to put the right people on the right projects and move them around easily on a simple, collaborative, calendar grid that’s as simple as working with Excel or another spreadsheet.
- Project planning – managing project details and having a single source of truth to feed all the other features.
- Analytics and reporting – giving insight into capacity, utilization, and performance for projects, clients, and individuals.
Resource Manager: Functions of the Role
The Resource Manager in project portfolio management is tasked with the management of project resources. This role can be assigned to both the project manager and an individual specialist — a member of the project team.
The project manager clarifies the list of types of resources needed for the project. Tasks for the implementation of which are planned to involve contractors are assigned resources describing the types of contractors. To implement the process, the following steps are implemented:
- The resource manager must check the list of types of required resources in the project schedule in the Project Portfolio management If it is necessary to add a new type of resource, the resource manager should contact the project portfolio manager with a request to add a new type of resources.
- The resource manager clarifies the number of resources necessary for the implementation of project tasks.
- The resource manager resolves the resource conflict for the project resource types in the project timeline.
The resource manager replaces the resource types for the tasks of the current week with resources from the company’s corporate resource pool. In a resource assignment, the project manager resolves resource conflicts. To implement the process, follow the steps:
- The resource manager replaces the types of resources and roles with the real resources of the company in the project schedule.
- The resource manager initiates the addition of new resources in the absence of the necessary resources.
- The resource manager solves resource conflicts between the company’s corporate resources.
Resource Management Reporting (How-to)
The project manager conducts a comprehensive analysis of project results and prepares a report on project implementation. When generating this report, the schedule is actively used as the source material. To implement the process, follow the steps:
- All members of the project team describe the management results of the project. The project participants record the positive and negative experiences obtained as a result of the project.
- All members of the project team form recommendations for the development of processes and tools for managing projects and portfolios.
- All project team members create recommendations for the development of non-project management company processes.
Resource management capabilities in your PPM software help enterprises manage resources across projects and portfolios more effectively. It provides the capability to manage project plans, resources, time, and project costing. All this data is held in one database and simplifies resource management reporting. PPM Express, being a comprehensive PPM tool, has the ability not only to collect all the necessary information from all your PM tools in one database but also has the unique ability to separate certain points of view to work with.
For instance, you can successfully create and manage reports without any need for manual data input. PPM Express provides reporting capabilities that access all your data or just a certain part of it you require today and present it in a variety of formats to suit each viewer’s requirements. Information can be presented as tables or charts, including histograms, line graphs, and pie charts. The layout is controlled by simple criteria screens and can be easily created from base report layouts.
Custom Designed Reports
PPM Express customizable resource management reports offer each type of stakeholder a unique, practical view of project-related insights. Create custom reports for:
- Resource managers
- Line managers
- Project managers
- HR managers, and more.
Cut through the clutter for clear, custom reports — creating resource reports just got easy. Our solution enables you to easily build your report exactly the way management wants to see it. PPM Express’s configurable resource reporting framework lets you pick your sorting dimensions, filters, and formulas.
Resource Management reports provide resource requesters and resource managers with resource allocations, availability, and utilization. You can generate reports for the following types of information:
- Availability: Total time that the resources are available after both hard and soft allocations. Availability is capacity minus allocation. A group availability report.
- Forecasted Utilization: Percentage of forecasted resource time utilization. It is calculated as the sum of allocated and confirmed hours, divided by the total capacity.
- Committed Utilization: Percentage of committed resource time utilization. It is calculated as allocated hours divided by the total capacity. Committed utilization report for a group.
- Allocation: Resource capacity, allocations, availability, and utilization. Allocation report for a group.
- Allocation details: A breakdown of all allocation requests, committed allocations, availability, and capacity hours.
Companies usually put a lot of effort into resource control. Having “Availability,” “Utilization,” and “Allocation” reports on hand allows your management to keep everyone busy while making sure their tasks are valuable for the company. Without this kind of visibility, it might get tricky when you must assign people to multiple projects happening at the same time, especially as your team and task pool grow.
Using PPM Express reporting capabilities is one of the easiest ways to check whether your resource management is successful. These reports can be useful not just to your resource manager, but also to your PMs, PMOs, CFO, CEO, and HR department. You can get the following data when having the appropriate resource reports on hand:
- Track and measure resource utilization in real-time.
- Compare timesheets with your team’s current availability.
- Compare “bookings” for future project plans with your team’s availability.
- Create forecasts and projections for the future, based on past data.
You can view and edit resource reports that focus on resource availability, utilization, and allocations. Resource management reports show resource allocation details in different formats for different periods. Configure and use these reports according to your business requirements.
Use forecasting analytics to plan corrective actions now. Predict future resource utilization across your business. Identify potential under- or over-utilization of resources to avoid conflicts and protect revenue. Learn from the past to improve future performance.
PPM Express resource management reports enable you to compare actual to forecasts. This increases the accuracy of demand forecasts and helps improve business processes.