A resource is a necessary asset whose main role is to help carry out a certain task or project. A resource can be a person, a team, a tool, finances, and time.

Most projects require many different resources to be completed. Resources should be assessed and allocated before a project begins.

Poor resource planning can result in running out of resources midway through a project or delaying deadlines in delivering the final product or service.

• What is resource management within project management?
• And while we're at it, what do we mean when we say, "resources?"

Both resource and project management are used to schedule and plan work activities. They make the overall project planning process more efficient. And can help your organization get to its destination.

Properly implementing resource management techniques into projects can help you use the resources in your organization more effectively and will help improve the health of your overall project portfolio.

The process of planning, organizing, scheduling and managing a project's resources like people, tools, equipment, tech, and facilities in the most efficient way is called project resource management. Maximizing utilization and ensuring the best possible use of the project’s elements.

Resource management is an aspect of the project management process that plans, organizes, manages, and measures people’s work. Its purpose is to plan, allocate and schedule the company’s resources as efficiently as possible. This is done in order to maximize each resource’s utilization.

Project resource management is about getting the best use from your organization's resources. Ensure that all the components of your projects are running smoothly and effectively.

Effective Resource Management is your starting point to ensuring efficient resource allocation and optimizing utilization. Successful companies are always focused on achieving high customer engagement & satisfaction, technologically advanced products & services and increased profitability.

Having the right resources assigned to the project based on skills is most important. And an effective resource management system can help achieve that.

Let us take a quick look into the 7 key qualities and benefits that an effective resource management would add to our organizations.

• Centralized resource management
• Proactive resource conflict management
• In-built time tracking
• Task categorization and tracking
• Project prioritization and Resource scheduling
• Enable organization wide collaboration
• Comprehensive reporting

Integrated resource management tools offer comprehensive strategic and tactical benefits.

• Task & time tracking
• Real-time status monitoring
• Resource pool management
• Leave management
• Resource availability, allocation & utilization views & reports
• Central collaboration across departments and project teams
• Help break silos
• Productivity tracking

Resource management systems are a great way to manage your most important assets - your resources and optimize their utilization and obtain maximum return on investment.

Resource management is the backbone of a project and business. It can be anything from people to machinery to facilities. Resources are whatever you need to deliver your services.

It is a practice or process by which tasks are allocated to human and non-human resources in such a way that it maximizes the efficiency of the resources in hand while improving outputs.

It helps to assign the right tasks to the right person in the right time, so that you can deliver the required outputs in the right time without any delays.

The advantages of resource management are,

• Enhance employee satisfaction
• Deliver product and services on time
• Increase productivity
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Save more time

Project Managers must have ready answers for

• How aligned are the deliverables with the agreed objective?
• How best did we meet the defined timelines and schedules?
• Were the agreed quality parameters met?
• Did we deliver within budget?

Some quick benefits of effective resource management

• It provides you with an overview of everyone and everything involved in your project.
• It gives you control over your project & reduces administrative costs
• Maximizes resource efficiency & increases accountability
• Prevents miscommunication mishaps
• Helps in taking right decisions

Resource Management isn't as simple as it sounds. Swimming in the sea of projects without proper distribution of resources will most probably drown your projects in no time.

"Generating productivity by allocating efficient resources for the right project at the right time is the key essence of Resource Management."

When it comes to managing and assigning your organization's resources, Resource Management plays a vital role in terms of budgets, capacity, and team members.

According to a report by workplace insight, 83% of employees cite feeling burnt out due to a high volume of emails. To make it even worse, 20% of employees report an "unmanageable" workload as the major reason for feeling burnout.

Essential Statistics interrelated to effective Resource Management

Let's take a look at the below statistics reported by notable research experts!

• 49% of employees cannot adhere to deadlines (PMI’s pulse survey, 2017).
• 26% of organizations use resource management for successful resource allocation (PMI’s pulse survey, 2017).
• Project Management professionals that believed in poor resource management as a project management problem, significantly increased by 60% in 2019 (Wellingtone, 2020).
• 25% of businesses sometimes never create project documents (Wellingtone, 2020).
• 88% of remote workers face continuous miscommunications issues with other team members (Institute of Leadership & Management).
• 54% of organizations have no access to real-time project KPIs (Wellingtone, 2020).

For successful Resource Management, the following aspects need attention:-

Priorities: Prioritizing resources according to the importance of a task aids in avoiding unforeseen hiccups of resources.

Granular Insights: Focuses on granular insights into what your team is working on and the timeframe required to accomplish a task.

Tracking Updates: Making the most of status updates helps in tracking the output throughout the project life cycle.

Successful project management is almost impossible if you are not able to accumulate and administer sufficient resources. This is why resource management plays such a major role in modern businesses & inspiring entrepreneurs to create new ways of handling professional duties.

The benefits of resource management are numerous, but here are the key ones:-

Cost reduction: Precision and accuracy guarantee timely delivery and reduce operational costs.

Accountability: If planned and executed properly, resource management maximizes the accountability within teams.

Customer satisfaction: The sheer fact that you can deliver projects on time will make your clients or customer satisfied and loyal.

Revenue increase: Bearing in mind the benefits mentioned above, it's not surprising to realize that quality resource management also leads to a significant revenue increase.

Here are best practices of resource management below,

• Create a strategic breakdown structure
• Gather operational inputs
• Have a distinct RACI matrix
• Prioritize Tasks
• Use resource management tools
• Respect the transparency principle
• Don't forget that staff is a resource

Resource management in Orangescrum revolves around 3 major features like:-

1. 1. Resource Availability
2. 2. Resource Utilization
3. 3. Resource Allocation

Resource Availability

Resource Availability solves one of the most key problems that Resource/Project managers face; tracking available resources for certain tasks.

You would have to continuously follow up with resources, juggle up between projects, tasks & you may end up with -

• Overloaded & demotivated resources
• Less than optimal utilization of resources
• Missing project deadlines
• Resource conflicts

Resource availability helps in analyzing availability of resources by providing:-

• Resource Grid view of availability data of all resources
• Identify available & overloaded resources. This helps in better utilization of resources
• Booked hours of the resources in different projects. This ensures effective task allocation and enhances effective management of task deadlines.

Resource Utilization

Now, once you are aware of the availability of the resources, next concern of any Resource/Project manager is to assign specific tasks to resources and track if the tasks are being completed within the estimated time by the resources.

Optimal Resource utilization helps in:-

• Conflict resolution
• Deliver projects on or before time
• Improve productivity
• Prevent deviation
• Improve productivity
• Increases revenue

Orangescrum helps you to track individual & team productivity across projects.

From Resource utilization, you can get following information:-

• Total hours spent on a project vs estimated time
• Billable and non-billable time spent across tasks
• Total hours spent by employees or resources on a particular date or day
• Which task types consumed the most time of your team

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation report is a one-stop window to find details of resource(s) allocated to projects, tasks and generate spent/estimated hour reports for specific time periods.

From Orangescrum Resource allocation report, you can find out following details:-

• No of tasks created/updated in a certain period of time.
• Total number of Estimated and Spent hours of tasks in a certain period of time.
• List of project & tasks assigned to a certain resource within that time range.
• List of tasks active, overdue and upcoming tasks across a project.
• List of tasks active, overdue and upcoming tasks assigned to a resource.
• You can export the report and present to top management.