Advance your resource management maturity by tracking these 5 essential KPIs for better forecasting, allocation, and results.
For resource managers, tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) isn’t just helpful, it’s essential.
Like pilots depending on their controls to avoid course deviation and crashes, without clear metrics, you fly blind – risking costly mistakes, project delays, and operational breakdowns.
KPIs keep your resource management plans on track, improving your resource allocation decision-making so you can lead with confidence.
The only catch? Choosing the right metrics to monitor can quickly become both confusing and time-consuming. And when it comes to KPIs, more is almost always never better. If you try to track everything, you'll rapidly become overwhelmed and lost in the weeds of the data.
Instead, focus on tracking the right things: the metrics that actually move the needle on what you are trying to achieve.
At Runn, we’ve already covered the 5 foundation KPIs every resource manager should track. Today, let’s dive into 5 advanced KPIs for those ready to elevate their resource management (RM) maturity.
These KPIs for RM maturity reveal how effective your processes are and how reliable the data you feed into your operations is – because without them, even the best-laid plans can quickly fall apart.
Let’s go:
Forecasting accuracy measures how closely your actual resource demand matches the predicted demand.
In doing so, it assists in:
Mid to advanced resource-mature organizations, aiming to shift their demand planning from reactive to predictive, will drive the most benefit from tracking this KPI.
It’s measured as a percentage and best calculated with regular input from sales, finance, and project managers working together. Once you have a grip on your forecast accuracy percentage, share it across departments/teams to encourage adjusting resource allocation accordingly.
Resource shortfall or surplus allows you to spot resource imbalances early on so you can hire or reallocate resources in time.
It’s a key metric, essential for mid to advanced resource-mature teams focused on optimizing their capacity. Depending on what you discover, resource shortage or surplus, the KPI helps you spot:
Resource shortfall/surplus is calculated in hours or Full-time Equivalent (FTE), which quantifies the number of employees' worth of work that employees are doing (either in shortfall or in surplus). It’s calculated as:
Resource shortfall/surplus = Planned FTE/hours - Actual available resource FTE/hours
If the result reads positive, say 3 FTEs, you’re understaffed by the equivalent of three full-time employees (which means you don’t have enough employees and need at least three more).
Alternatively, if the final number is negative, you’ve a resource surplus – that is, more people than needed.
Both resource and project managers own this metric. HR is also often involved since the KPI aids in making strategic hiring plans.
Continuously improving this metric, ideally to a zero or minimal shortage or surplus of resources, helps you improve employee engagement. It also gives you the data needed to support employee training and contractor usage decisions.
Actual versus planned demand compares your initial resource projections with the actual or real-world resource utilization. By doing so, it helps you:
Resource managers throughout the maturity spectrum – from early stage to advanced maturity – closely review this metric to surface project risks before it’s too late. It’s calculated as:
Actual vs. Planned Demand = Actual resource demand (in hours or FTE) - Planning resource demand (hours or FTE)
If the result is positive, your demand is higher than planned, which means you underestimated the hours of work.
Similarly, if the result reads negative, your actual resource demand is lower than planned, so you likely overestimated the number of people you needed.
Data driven from actual versus planned demand KPI also helps you adjust future resource allocation and project estimates, as well as identify skill shortage or over-allocation. This makes it great for improving not just resource management but also project planning.
To make the most of this KPI, ensure you’ve an up-to-date project management system and transparent timesheet submission. It’s only then that resource managers and project leads can get accurate insights into demand variance and identify maturity gaps.
Dig Deeper: Create an Interlock Framework to Improve Your Demand Forecasting ➡️
Revenue per employee is an advanced resource maturity KPI that links business outcomes to employee productivity.
The metric gives you an overview of how well your staff contributes to overall profitability, helping you dial into the nitty-gritty of process improvement, employee efficiency, and resource utilization.
In short, revenue per employee helps you:
It’s calculated as:
Revenue per employee = Total Revenue/Number of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Employees
Since this resource maturity KPI links employee performance to financial performance, it requires you to work with your finance department to correctly determine the figure.
Similar to actual versus planned demand, budget variance shows the difference between the planned budget and actual costs.
It’s an important metric for resource management at varying maturity levels, but specifically for advanced maturity stages. It’s calculated as:
Budget variance = Budgeted costs - actual cost/ budgeted cost x 100%
Regularly monitoring this metric helps each function:
You can best determine your budget variance with close collaboration between the resource, project management, and finance teams.
Dig deeper: Why Do Projects Go Over Budget? ➡️
These metrics give everyone, from stakeholders to project leads, a shared, objective, data-led overview of project needs, resource capacity and efficiency, and planning accuracy. In turn, the visibility makes it easy to catch bottlenecks early and align on priorities.
Tracking these metrics gives you actuals compared to forecasts, which aids in refining estimates and project planning over time. Running shortfall/surplus data in interlock meetings also lets you course-correct before it’s too late, leading to more accurate demand inputs.
Use the data gaps you extract to engage senior leadership in driving process improvements. For instance, get buy-in for new hires or specific upskilling programs.
By consistently reflecting on these advanced metrics, organizations can progressively enhance their demand planning accuracy and resource management processes – taking small, corrective steps at a time.
For more guidance on what this process could look like in your organization, check out our deep-dive into resource management maturity with Ryan Childers from the Resource Management Institute, and Matt Webb from Runn's very own team 🎥
The journey to resource management maturity looks different for all organizations. But we have some parting advice: start small.
Instead of tracking every metric out there, choose the ones most relevant to your business so you can focus on gathering accurate data and regularly tracking it to drive meaningful change.
We’ll leave you with two more resources to up your resource management maturity level:
