Discover the key elements of a resource management framework – and bring them together in your roadmap for successful project resourcing
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A resource management framework is a document that explains how you’re going to plan, allocate, and manage resources in your organization.
It’s basically your resource management playbook – what you do and how you do it.
In professional service businesses – such as IT and software services firms – a resource management framework can optimize how you turn your human capital into revenue and profits.
But it’s not just about the money. It’s also about future-proofing your business with a happy and highly skilled workforce that delivers exceptional results, every time.
If you don’t have one yet, here’s what you need to start creating your first resource management framework and lay solid foundations for effective resource management processes in your firm.
There are three components of an effective resource management framework:
Together, they cover the strategic and operational sides of effective resource management, optimizing both current projects and future opportunities for your business.
Resource planning is about looking ahead and ensuring you have the people, skills, and capacity required for upcoming projects. It’s a more strategic side to resource management that often goes overlooked.
While resource planning may seem like a simple matter of supply and demand, it is far more complex in practice.
It’s further complicated by the fact that you’re not just staffing a single project – you’re resource planning for multiple projects simultaneously, and the jigsaw pieces keep moving.
When a challenge is both complex and critical, it’s essential that you have processes in place to manage it to the best of your ability. A structured approach to resource planning considers the following:
Audit your existing resources: roles, skills, costs, capacity, and resource availability. Ideally, you’ll maintain a centralized skills inventory that maps directly to live project schedules. If not, start with a baseline audit to understand exactly who you have and where your gaps are.
Analyze in-flight projects to understand who is working on what and where pressure points exist. Visibility helps you identify under- or overutilized resources early and take corrective action.
Forecast what you’ll need over the next 6–18 months. Collaboration between sales, delivery, and leadership is crucial here, as is scenario planning to anticipate best- and worst-case workload scenarios.
Compare your projected resource pool to anticipated demand. If gaps exist, plan proactive strategies – like targeted hiring, upskilling, or flexible resourcing – to stay ahead.
This is strategic capacity planning and workforce development in action: making sure supply and demand are balanced in the most cost-effective, sustainable way.
Including your resource planning strategy in your resource management framework reduces the risk of project delays, burnout, and missed opportunities.
Interested in learning more? Discover the different stages of resource planning ➡️
Resource allocation is the process of matching people to projects and tasks at hand. This is what most people think of when they think about resource management – the day-to-day operational side, not the more strategic elements.
In IT organizations with a lower level of resource management process maturity – such as startups starting to outgrow ad hoc staffing decisions – allocations might be made on a first-come-first-served basis, or based purely on project managers’ knowledge of people and skills.
That isn’t the best way to staff a project, because it means you’re not optimizing project outcomes by choosing the very best people for the job.
Firms with a more mature resource allocation approach will take a wide range of factors into consideration – aiming to balance schedule, skills, cost, and staff wellbeing – to achieve the best result possible with the resources available.
A resource allocation strategy should set out the following information:
What managers should take into account when allocating resources to projects.
For example:
A resource utilization rate is an expression of how much time a resource should have allocated to projects, to maintain a healthy workload and maximize productivity.
Usually, it’s about 85% but it varies by industry. It’s important to have a target rate to make sure you’re not wasting resource capacity or overworking people to the point of burnout. See more below.
Team members can become a bottleneck if multiple projects need the same resources at the same time. When this happens, you need a way to address it. For example, allocating MVPs to the highest priority projects? Who makes that decision?
Your resource allocation workflow describes how managers request resources and how allocation decisions are made.
It’s important to have a transparent process to ensure fairness and optimize resources according to the benefit each allocation or project brings to the business. Include indicative turnaround times and targets for time-to-fill project roles, to keep your team working efficiently and accountable.
Resource tracking is about monitoring how team members are actually being used to ensure your resourcing decisions stay aligned with plans.
There are lots of reasons why your best laid resource plans can go wrong – from over- or under-estimating resource needs, to clients changing project scope, or the domino effect of delays in one project derailing allocations for another.
Stuff happens. What’s important is that it doesn’t happen unnoticed. And that’s where tracking comes in. Your resource management framework should establish exactly which metrics you’ll be monitoring and how you’ll care for your resource data.
For example:
Measure both billable and non-billable hours to understand how effectively your team’s time is being spent. This helps ensure that billable work is maximized while non-billable activities like training, meetings, or internal projects are accounted for.
Introduce time-tracking so resources can record the time they spend on specific tasks. It’s not about monitoring whether they’re working; it’s about knowing how long tasks take, so you can get better at project forecasting.
Review how long you thought tasks would take and cost, against how long they actually took and really cost. Again, this helps improve planning accuracy next time around, reducing the risk of over- or under-estimating.
Monitor how much time, budget, or effort has been used, relative to the project plan. If your burn rate is faster or slower than anticipated, this could indicate trouble.
Make sure work is spread equitably between teams. If one group is permanently overworked while another has endless bench time, there’s room to even things out and increase velocity.
And let’s not forget that your team impacts allocation efficiency too, so track KPIs on your performance as well, particularly time-to-fill project roles. This helps you track whether your processes are efficient and meeting business needs.
Now that you know what a resource management framework covers, you can start to document it.
There’s no set format for a resource management framework. You might choose to document it all in a simple PDF, record it as Loom videos, present it at pop-up information sessions.
The most important thing is thinking, documenting, and sharing the information so everyone is on the same page.
As with any resource management documentation you create, remember the following golden rules:
Okay, it’s not quite ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’, but it’s close enough.
A great resource management framework isn’t just about documenting your processes; it’s a commitment to working smarter and delivering more consistently.
When paired with the right technology and reporting, it becomes one of your most powerful levers for sustainable growth.
If your professional services firm is ready for reliable, repeatable, scalable resource management practices, see what Runn can do for you ➡️
