What are the critical indicators that you need to level up your resource management? Is now the right time, or is it too soon? Take a look at these seven signs.
Sometimes, better outcomes are only a small switch away – such as moving from spreadsheets to a powerful resource management software.
But when is it actually the right time for you to start planning your people and projects in a centralized tool?
Look, we get it – implementing process improvements and tooling upgrades is a serious undertaking which requires commitment and time. And it's not always the right time to make that investment.
And just because we Runn folks have built a robust resource management platform doesn’t mean we always double-down and tell people that the right time to upgrade their current systems was "Yesterday"!
But if you’re on the fence, take a look through these seven warning signs and see if they resonate with you. They’ll tell you exactly how ready you are to move your project planning and resource operations to a resource management tool:
Email and/or Slack messages reading ‘hey, how busy are you this month’ can only help so much – giving you partial, guesstimated visibility into your team’s workload.
The result? Insights into what each employee is working on and how packed they are easily slip through the cracks.
Over time, this poor visibility into your team’s workload culminates in some employees working over their capacity while others sit idle. And in turn, this leads to workplace burnout for some, growing bench time for others, and, ultimately, a dip in employee engagement.
The solution then is full visibility into not just how packed each employee is, but also by how much. A resource management software serves as your single source of truth giving you full visibility into employee availability (both a bird's eye view and granular insight into their workload).
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Software like Runn also shows you upcoming holidays and employees’ planned time off. This allows you to assign projects and tasks based on individuals’ real-time availability, helping you plan around upcoming holidays, periods of leave, and subsequently, avoiding availability clashes.
At the end of the day, assigning per availability and workload also reduces imbalanced workloads and idle time.
Small teams typically check in with their employees on their skillset, strengths, and interests. And it works for as long as the workload is limited. The moment your workload or team grows, manual check-ins start becoming time-consuming.
Left unaddressed, teams end up resorting to assigning projects based on roles instead of skills, compromising project quality and never fully leveraging your team members’ skills. Down the line, this contributes to poor employee engagement too.
The core challenge here is not realizing you need a skills inventory, a live database carrying information on each employee’s skills, location, interests, and other traits relevant to your business operations.
And even if you do realize and/or have a skills database, maintaining an up-to-date one is a beast of a challenge in itself. Why? Because tracking skills in spreadsheets is a productivity-draining task – one that gets harder as your team grows and employees' skills develop over time.
Naturally, you resort to role-based resource allocation instead of the smarter, more ROI-yielding option of assigning projects per employee skills and interests.
If all this sounds familiar, switching to a resource planning software will help you improve your resource allocation and skills tracking processes – making it a breeze to match employees to best-fit projects based on skills and availability.
This happens in two ways as your resource management tool:
Dig deeper: Right Person, Right Project, Right Time: The Importance of Resource Allocation ➡️
Find yourself grappling with last-minute asks from clients for additional work, or their request to work with a specific team member? Or a key team member is due to be off work soon, but the information slipped your mind?
Resource conflicts like these constantly disrupt project timelines, increasing project risks. New projects that may or may not start soon add to the confusion, requiring you to move things around significantly once approved.
If you’re in this boat, consider planning projects in your resource management software. In doing so, you can:
In turn, centralizing project planning and resource management in one place reduces last-minute changes and resource clashes. It also ensures projects are completed by their desired timelines and within the allotted project costs.
Not having granular details around your team’s time off, workload, and capacity utilization quickly leads to scheduling issues.
If you’ve ever assigned a project with a tight timeline to a team member who is already overloaded or has an upcoming vacation soon, you know how messy project schedules can get as a result.
Additionally, remote work and flexible roles mean not all employees have the same work days and work hours. Their hourly rate may also differ. And when you add contractors to the mix, variables only grow – making project planning and resource scheduling even more challenging.
Again, a resource management software helps here. It gives you the ability to:
In short, a resource management tool helps you go as detailed as you need to with your resource pool — assisting you in assigning projects per attributes essential to your unique workflow.
John couldn’t cover for Asha while she took some much-delayed time off? Was Devin slower to complete the specific task that Karl typically takes two days to wrap up?
If you’ve come face to face with resource issues like these, then you’ve likely seen multiple project delays – all thanks to poor resource management and project planning.
Changes to projects and pipeline are inevitable. And in several instances, just including enough buffer time in your project timelines or relying on your A-star employees isn’t enough (if anything, you risk burning out those employees).
Naturally, letting these issues get out of hand jeopardizes project completion, customer experience, and business growth.
But thankfully, using a robust resource management tool when signals like these show up frequently in your workflow helps. In fact, using the software to plan what-if scenarios prepares you and your team for potential delays and changes when they happen.
Using Runn, for example, you can (visually) review the impact of a likely what-if scenario on your employee’s utilization and capacity rate. Once you’ve gained insight into the potential impact, you can plan to avoid those risks – say, by bringing a contractor on board.
At the same time, you can keep tabs on your workforce’s future capacity in Runn. From there, monitor how upcoming works impact individuals’ capacity and whether and when they have the availability to take on more work.
In short, better managing your people and projects reduces project risks and associated delays while ensuring your workforce isn’t overworked. No wonder, Jason Mills, Director of Engineering at TribalScale notes planning their employees’ capacity with Runn has been super helpful for them:
The capacity planning chart really changed things for us. Being able to drill into a team and see where the cliffs are has been a huge benefit.”
Here’s a detailed buyer’s guide to help you find the best-fit resource management software for your needs ➡️
Unsure if your workload has genuinely increased and merits a new hire? Do you always question if the new hire is a temporary need or a genuinely permanent one? You’re not alone.
75% of recruiters admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a vacancy. And a leading reason for it? You don’t have enough in-depth insights into your workload and skills gaps.
A lack of data-driven workload forecasting and real-time insights into your workforce’s skill overview are the real culprits here. Think of it like this:
The result? You can’t accurately predict hiring needs. Moreover, you can’t tell which skills to hire for.
Here again, a resource management tool comes in handy, helping you make accurate workload forecasts and identify skills gaps. You can also use placeholder allocations to make informed hiring decisions based on skills requirements and capacity forecasting.
With inaccurate project forecasting, last-minute changes in project plans, resource clashes, and poor to no visibility into your skill pool, it's only natural your profits end up looking lackluster.
This holds true even if you’re setting up a clear project budget and an expenditure plan, because what’s missing is proactively tracking your project budget against expenses.
With a resource management tool, you can improve project profitability by not only improving project planning and resource allocation but also by better tracking your project budget.
Broadly, you can maximize your project profits and reduce revenue leakage in three ways:
In a nutshell, effective resource management boils down to thorough project planning and allocating resources based on individuals’ skills, availability, interest, and upcoming days off.
On paper, this seems simple, and for a time, spreadsheets may be all you need to manage everything well.
But as your workload and team grow, spreadsheets will stop serving as a helpful tool for managing resources, assigning projects, and tracking employees’ skills data in real-time, and become more burdensome.
You’ll see project details slipping through the cracks, skills-based allocation taking the backseat, and your resource management challenges growing. Most of all, you’ll notice the seven signs we discussed above.
Already face to face with these signs and ready to switch to a resource management software? Here’s our honest review of 11 resource management tools to help you kickstart your research.
