Resource booking is about matching the right people to the right projects at the right time – to achieve productivity, profit, and positive outcomes.
Before we talk resource booking, let’s talk about efficient resource management.
When people think about resources, they often think of raw materials. Resource booking and management are easier to understand in those terms.
Think about a manufacturing business. It’s clear you need to be careful with your resources to make a profit. You don’t want to order too many materials and spend too much. And you want to process your materials carefully so there’s minimal wastage.
But when it comes to human resources, people don’t always think the same way. However, managing human resources effectively is just as critical. It is equally easy to overspend and underutilize your workforce.
Just like with raw materials, your people are already paid for. To maximize profitability – and productivity and client satisfaction – you need to carefully combine them to get the most value from their time.
This requires planning and precise management – a process known as resource booking.
Resource booking is the process of scheduling and allocating human resources to projects and tasks within an organization. It’s about assigning the right people to the right tasks at the right time to optimize project outcomes – and is a key tenet of successful project management.
Sometimes called resource scheduling, resource booking is most relevant to project-based and professional service firms, which create dynamic project teams from their wider workforce. But it is growing in popularity with traditional businesses too, as they realize the productivity benefits of more flexible workforce composition.
Resource booking is concerned with:
By putting the right people in the right place at the right time, resource booking:
But these aren’t the only goals of effective resource scheduling. It can also be used to identify and provide stretch assignments for junior employees, to support your upskilling and workforce development agenda.
And it is invaluable for balancing workloads to prevent burnout and improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Businesses invest a lot of money in their resources, so it’s essential to maximize the return on that investment.
Without resource booking, projects can be hampered by:
Conversely, with resource booking, project managers benefit from:
Despite the many benefits of resource booking, lots of businesses don’t – or can’t – do it. Projects are dynamic. Allocations aren’t always clear. Here are a few challenges you’ll need to overcome to ace your resource allocations.
Allocating resources to multiple projects is highly complex. You need to distribute resources between different projects – often interdependent projects – without causing any delays or disruption. You need a clear way to visualize all projects and allocations if you want to avoid conflicts, prioritization problems, and confusion.
Projects are often subject to changes in scope, timelines, and requirements. This disrupts your original resource plan and can have knock-on effects for other projects too. You’ll need a way to respond fast and accurately to project changes, so you can reallocate resources and reduce risk.
Obviously, another big challenge is having limited resources, especially people with the most in-demand skills. This can lead to project delays and missed opportunities. You need a way to allocate resources to the highest-priority projects. Plus, information on resource utilization to inform future hiring and training decisions.
We’ve dedicated our careers to creating the best software for managing resources, so we hate to see businesses struggling with unfit tools like spreadsheets. Resource planning in Excel isn’t scalable, sustainable, or sensible for anything more than a dozen resources. It’ll cost you time, clarity, and accuracy :-(
Before Runn, we used spreadsheets for project planning, tracking resource availability, capacity planning…everything. Understanding all the different spreadsheets floating about becomes a problem. It was a total headache to look at the spreadsheet and try to answer even basic questions like, when's that project finishing? Is there a placeholder here? Who's it for?" - Nick Boni, Director of Digital, Lola Tech
Read how Lola Tech solved their resource growing pains with Runn ➡️
While there are challenges to overcome, they’re not insurmountable. You simply need to put in a little groundwork and you’ll be ready to book resources with clarity and confidence. Here’s what you need to get started with resource scheduling:
The first thing you need for effective resource booking is a centralized list of all of your resources. To optimize your allocations and minimize idle time, you need to know all of the resources available to you – it’s called talent discoverability.
Your central resource pool should include information on:
This will help you match people to tasks based on their knowledge, their ability to deliver great project outcomes, whether they’re within budget, and whether the project matches their ambitions.
Which helps ensure your project is staffed by skilled, cost-effective, engaged resources, ready to do great work.
Of course, it isn’t just skills and interests that matter. Another key aspect of resource booking is matching opportunity to availability.
Resource booking relies on having accurate, comprehensive data on every team member’s allocations, capacity, and forthcoming leave. This lets project managers understand exactly who’s available and can take on the tasks at hand.
Live, real-time data is essential. Project schedules, scope, and staffing change frequently. If your data is out-of-date, you might book resources based on old information. This could mean your chosen resources aren’t actually available or that your project will push them over-capacity. This poses a risk to both the project and your people.
When the whole point of resource booking is optimizing outcomes, you need optimal inputs. And that means live resource data, not static information stagnating in spreadsheets.
Most people find data easier to understand when it’s presented visually rather than rows of data. For faster resource scheduling, you’ll ideally have:
A dedicated resource management system isn’t required for better resource booking. But it makes the process faster and more accurate. So instead of poring over unreliable spreadsheets for hours – or even days – you can see and optimize allocations in minutes.
Resource management tools like Runn are designed to increase your visibility into resources, their skills and allocations, so you can easily search, select, and drag people into projects. Intuitive data visualization also reports capacity and clashes at-a-glance so you know when to take on more work… or more people.
The capacity planning we had done in Excel had taken weeks. When we did that same work in Runn, it was completed in two days."- Cindy Tan, General Manager of IT Planning, TPG Telecom
Read how TPG Telecom manages 600 resources effortlessly in Runn ➡️
Runn is a purpose-built resource management platform – designed by project managers FOR project managers. Invest a short amount of time setting up your projects and resources in Runn and reap the benefits of fast, accurate, data-informed scheduling.
Here’s how to get started with resource booking using Runn.
Remember – if you decide to start managing your resources through Runn, our customer success team can help you make the transition. Meaning successful resource management is even easier to achieve.
