How Project Managers Can Master Resource Management

Tasks

Fuente: Project Management | Temas: Project Management. | 2 febrero, 2022 | 0

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Galen Low

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Throughout my career as a project manager, I’ve had the luxury of working with some of
the best resource managers and traffic managers in the agency world.

While I was looking at the big picture on a project-by-project basis, my resource

management team was scrutinizing the details of my project needs and working their
magic to orchestrate our entire organization’s resources across all the active and
upcoming projects in our agency’s portfolio.

But the fact of the matter is that not every project manager has a resource management
team. Heck, in my current role I don’t have that luxury anymore!

So to help us, project managers, out, I decided to chat with a few of my former resource
manager colleagues and get their insights on the most important things to consider when
resourcing a project to help make sure your project goes to plan.

Here’s what I’ll cover:

Why Is Resource Management Important?

Before we get into it, it’s probably worthwhile to talk about the importance of resource
management in the context of delivering digital projects. So let me set the table.

In a nutshell, resource management is what keeps your project moving by ensuring

you’ve got the right people, materials, and finances to execute your plan. It’s tantamount
to having the right fuel to put into your engine. No fuel? No power. Period.

And that may sound obvious, but a 2020 survey of project management professionals by
Wellingtone revealed that “poor resource management” was one of the largest project
management challenges. Mobilizing teams of people is difficult—for everyone!
Then add the complexities of the digital world, where technology, user expectations, and
the competitive landscape are constantly changing. Teams are distributed, churn is high,
and the emerging tech you require may still be scarce.

Sure, there are some excellent resource management software solutions out there that
can help you plan, develop, and manage resources for your projects. But without the right
considerations, the differences between a next-generation software solution and doing
long division on a chalkboard are going to be negligible.

What Does A Resource Manager Do?

A resource manager oversees allocation of resources (predominantly people, often of a

variety of levels and sometimes skill sets) to several projects at once. Resource managers
operate at the level of the company or organization and want to identify the resources
that best fit each project. They support the project management team and the discipline
leads to ensure the right decisions are made on a project assignment basis to benefit the
individual, the wider team, the overall company, and the client.

Unlike a resource manager, a project manager oversees just one project or sometimes
multiple projects at a time. In short, as a project manager, your project is your world (within
working hours!).

You are responsible for ensuring your project gets completed within its given time frame.
And you are concerned with details: project budget, project scheduling, specific project
tasks, and milestones. You probably care that your team is happy too, but staying on the
critical path is paramount.

In an ideal world, your agency or wider company would have a person dedicated to
fulfilling that resource management function, but if not, factoring in some impactful
resource management considerations can help you deliver your project within plan by
foreseeing roadblocks, getting the right people involved when they’re needed, and
keeping the team engaged.

Okay, with that in mind, let’s dive into some key resource management considerations for
project managers.

6 Resource Management Techniques In Project Management

Here are six key resource management techniques for project managers to know.
Ensure your project plan is collaborative.

1. Have A (Collaborative) Project Plan

During the course of a project, one of your main responsibilities as a project manager is
to make sure that project scheduling and the availability of specific people to do those
tasks align.

This isn’t a nut you need to crack on your own: sit down with your cross-discipline
partner(s) in crime to discuss your estimate and general project plan before resourcing
even begins.

A well thought-out project plan will help make sure your project is clear from the start in
terms of which levels and individual skill sets are needed, and when. This is especially
important when there are competing projects that are all after the same peoples’ time.
Capacity planning is often a tricky balancing act.

2. Shore Up Your Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is the process you use to schedule team member hours against a fixed
amount of work. The ongoing exercise is to balance the availability of your colleagues
with what the project requires as well as, of course, your budget.

You can’t effectively work out the time needed without breaking down those project tasks
and understanding them, so use that project plan to establish a framework for the job as
far as tasks go and then create your resource plan.

Your team will look to you (and, ideally, their discipline leads) to clarify the specific nature
of the tasks and who will be working on them, and when.

For example, if your online advertising project requires a bunch of image cropping before
going into more advanced animation, you probably want to assign the first task to one of
the more junior members of the design team before it goes to a more senior animator.
This should be worked out well in advance so you’re able to schedule in the right
resources for the job, when you need them.
Once you have assigned tasks, it’s critical to monitor progress to ensure the project stays
on schedule so work out between your team the best way to communicate briefings,
deadlines, and deliverables to make sure everyone is on the same page with
expectations.

It’s also worth being aware that too much oversight (or micro-management) can hurt
morale. Try to strike a balance between overseeing the project and becoming an
overbearing manager. A daily or weekly standup and regular communications over Slack
(or another instant messaging tool), bolstered by rock-solid documentation and crystal
clear task briefs, will work wonders.

Workload management also requires balance.

3. Understand And Monitor Workload

Separate from capacity planning is workload. Workload management is the process of

allocating the appropriate blocks of time that will allow a team member to succeed.

Some tasks require longer periods of contiguous, uninterrupted time. Others are better
when spread out and interspersed with other diverse tasks.

For example, when you’re planning capacity, you might see that your technical architect
is free for 1 hour per day for the next three weeks.
 • If you start on Monday, on paper it looks like you can get that integration strategy
done by the end of the month.
• But if that individual is context switching across a different project every hour, the
likelihood of that team member being able to switch gears, get reacquainted with
your project’s requirements, and be in the right headspace to get meaningful work
done in that hour is very, very low. They may be within capacity, but their
workload will be too heavy for them to be effective.
• On the other hand, you may have a team member available to do data entry for
twenty days straight, but by the end of that twenty days, their engagement levels
and productivity levels probably won’t be all that high.

The bottom line here is this: just because someone on your team looks like they have
capacity to get the task done doesn’t automatically mean that they won’t get
overwhelmed with their workload.

Keeping team members utilized ensures they remain engaged and satisfied.

4. Have Strategies To Keep Your People Utilized

Underutilization can also do harm to productivity and general team morale. Burnout
sucks, but so does being bored. And because labor is often a project’s biggest expense,
you should take care to assign all team members tasks that optimize their talents.
Part of this idea means adjusting the schedule so that they have just the right amount
of work. Too much work causes stress, and too little work means sitting idle.

If folks get through their work quicker than what was set out in your resource plan, keep
a little to-do list of project activities that can keep them busy.

If you’re part of a bigger company, work with your management and marketing teams to
see if there are internal efforts that would benefit the greater good that could stop
boredom settling in if work hits a dry patch.

The impact will be a more engaged team that isn’t constantly looking for the exit.

Ever heard of self-managing teams? If you're wondering what that could mean for you,
check this out: Project Teams Without Project Managers: Exploring The PM Dilemma
(with Julia Ryzhkova from Railsware)

Equipment resourcing is also critical to project success.

5. Don’t Neglect Your Equipment Resource Needs

While people are the most important resource in project management, the management
of equipment required for the project can’t be ignored, either. I’m reminded of a story a
colleague told me of a project where they nearly forgot to order the servers in time for a
massive ERP implementation.

But it doesn’t have to be the big, obvious pieces of gear. For example, when bringing
on new employees and contractors for your project, you may need to provide a laptop
and the appropriate licenses for your cloud-based tools.

If it takes three days to get a tool subscription approved from the finance team, that
could be three days of a team member being blocked from completing their task. That
needs to get factored into your resource planning.

To keep your ducks in a row when it comes to equipment, strong asset management
and procurement processes should be part of that consideration set:

Assess What You Have

Is your company’s list of equipment up to date? It’s possible you already have what you
need in your inventory. Make sure you compile a complete, accurate, up-to-date list of
the equipment you have access to, real and cloud-based.

Assess What You Need

Once you acquire what you need, there are other elements to equipment resource
management. For instance, maintenance is an important equipment-related project
resource management task. If you fix something before it breaks, you can avoid
unnecessary and unexpected expenses down the road.

Reallocate When Necessary

Sometimes, if a piece of equipment is idle for one task, you can move it to a different
task to keep the production moving along. It doesn’t always make sense to spread
equipment resources evenly among tasks.

Figure out how to deploy your equipment where your project(s) need it most. This is a
fluid situation that could benefit from a resource scheduling tool. Software can help not
only with the allocation of equipment now but also forecasting when you may need to
reallocate down the road.
Budget will influence your resource management decisions.

6. Master Budget Management

The resource that is surprisingly the most overlooked when planning project resources
is actually money. Financial resources are the enabler that allows you to have the
people and equipment you need—it’s the fuel for the fuel.

According to FinancesOnline, 28 percent of projects fail because of inaccurate cost

estimates. Going over budget clearly will hurt the project’s bottom line. However, going
under budget isn’t always beneficial either. Management may see the discrepancy and
think that the company could have used the funds allocated to your project elsewhere.
The most important principle in budgeting is accuracy.

For project managers, this places added emphasis on cost management. To keep costs
in line, you have to allocate the right budget resources. In fact, your budget sets the
boundaries for the management of your other resources.
Budget Resource Management Tasks

Budget resource management involves four primary tasks:

• Planning: Identify the resources you will need before the project begins.
• Estimation: Quantify the costs required to obtain the resources you identified in
the planning stage.
• Budgeting: Assign a financial value to each task, fit tasks into a timeline, and
set milestones to judge efficiency.
• Controlling: Measure the actual costs of the project against the budget and
implement a plan for reining in any deviations in cost.

The alignment of finances with resources underpins a project’s success. If your

resources don’t meet the necessary requirements, you run the risk of delaying your
timeline and increasing costs. If your resources are overqualified, costs can spike.