Benchmark Your Resource Management Practices from Basic to Best [Infographic]

Resource management is a far-reaching discipline. It covers everything from more day-to-day activities like tracking people’s skills and hours, to advanced strategic activities like capacity planning and workforce development. 

Every organization is at a different level of maturity. In Runn’s survey, 43% of organizations rated their resource management maturity as operationally sound but not yet strategic.

However, no one is expecting you to jump from zero to advanced practice overnight. But it’s valuable to see what good practice looks like. 

The table below describes different levels of operational resource planning maturity. Note that it’s focused purely on getting your day-to-day resource planning right. It doesn’t cover more advanced strategic practice.

Do you recognize your organization anywhere on this model?

Not sure where you sit on this scale? Don't worry, that’s understandable. You might not be aware of what processes and plans exist in different pockets around the business. We’ll guide you through the process of understanding and benchmarking your current resource planning practices, before explaining how you can build on them.

This is a meaty topic and we have a detailed guide available – How to assess your resource planning maturity and why it matters. Here’s a brief overview to get you started.

1. Talk to the right people

Identifying the right stakeholders is key to understanding your resource planning processes. Some likely people include:

• Senior leadership team
• Sales team or project intake managers
• Resource managers or allocators
• Project managers
• Team members (the resources in question)

Related: How to Get Buy-in for Resource Management

2. Think about your project intake process

• Who’s in charge of feeding projects to teams? 
• Do they consider resource availability before booking a project? 
• Are projects prioritized according to business value, to help you allocate your top talent to the most important work? 

Read on: How to Improve a Project Intake Process

3. Understand how resource allocations are made

• Who decides who works on each project? 
• What criteria do they use when selecting people – Availability? Skills? Cost?  
• What data and tools do they use to identify, select, and allocate people to projects? 
• If you’re not sure, start by asking people themselves – who allocates their work to them? 

4. Review any documented processes

• Are there any documented processes for how resources are allocated? 
• If so, who owns them? Do they belong to individual teams or apply across the whole organization? 
• Are they widely adopted and broadly ignored?
• Ask stakeholders what they think – Do they summarize the process well? Are they well-thought-out or due for review? 

5. Assess skills and people data 

• Do you collect, store, and use data about resources to help plan who will work on projects?
• If so, what do you collect?  e.g. Roles, skills, capacity, availability, cost, interests.
• Where is this information stored? How often is it updated and who by? 

Related: The 6 Skills Management Best Practices Your Business Needs

6. Look at tools and tech

• What tools are being used to:
  
  • Manage how resources are allocated to projects? 
  • Monitor capacity and availability? 
  • Track skills? 
• Are they siloed or centralized? 
• Ask users – Are they fit for purpose? What are the pain points? 

6. Analyze gaps and pain points

• Where are resources overused, underused, or wasted?
• Where are the bottlenecks and inefficiencies?
• Understanding different stakeholders’ perspectives – how does the lack of resource planning impact them?

Once you’ve spoken to the right people and asked the right questions, you should be able to pinpoint yourself on the basic, better, best framework above. You might be basic on one factor but best on another. Plotting your current position gives you something to aim for.

Continue reading: 

• How to Assess Your Resource Management Maturity Level
• 10 Steps to an Effective Resourcing Strategy
• 5 KPIs that Move the Needle on Resource Management Maturity
• How to Deal with Resistance to Resource Management