| At a glance Ø Resource management is crucial for both short-term and long-term successes of organizations Ø In most organizations, managers struggle get to reliable and real-time information on resources Ø PSA software places ‘Single Version Of The Truth” at managers’ fingertips enabling data-based collaboration and decision making. |
You are an IT services organization that delivers projects to your customers. You need a large number of highly skilled resources for your projects. Availability of the right resources at the right time is the single most important success factor for your company.
You have enterprise software packages like CRM, ERP, and HRM. You have project management software. You need to do resource capacity planning from time to time to ensure that you are adequately staffed and at the same time you don’t have to bench too many resources.
Fragmented information
Your CRM system contains information about current projects and the prospects in the pipeline. But it may not have details of projects and resources needed.
Your project management software has project-by-project work breakdown structures (WBS) and tasks but may not have granular information about the resources that have matching skill sets to perform the tasks.
Your HRM system has personnel data and their skill sets but it may not have their costs and project related information.
Your ERP system has employee and other direct and indirect costs. It also has a project-wise billing schedule. But your ERP system may not have data on resources needed and allocated to various projects.
Slow, laborious, and error-prone
Your resource capacity planning is fragmented because you can’t access all information that you need simultaneously. Your managers rely on spreadsheets, and manual calculations to estimate resource requirements, utilization, and gaps.
The reality keeps changing as projects progress, new projects come up, people become temporarily unavailable, some leave, and some people join. The project requirements keep changing too.
Such a slow and laborious process leads to errors in resource capacity planning. Moreover, a significant amount of managerial bandwidth gets used up just to keep updating and gathering information.
You are never on top of the situation.
What is the way out?
Consider Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.
PSA software integrates various software packages into workflows that cover opportunity-to-cash cycles of all your projects. It provides a ‘Single Version of The Truth’ of all information related to projects, people, costs, billing, and collections.
PSA software provides real-time visibility into resource utilization, future needs, and benched resources. It helps in optimizing resource allocation to prevent delays as well as the benching of people. PSA software helps in tracking the development of employees’ skill sets over time.
PSA software gives the ability to analyze past data and spot trends. You can make informed decisions about the future. By analyzing customers’ choices and needs in the past, you can prepare realistic project proposals and thereby improve your resource planning.
PSA software puts you on top
PSA software places ‘Single Version Of The Truth” at managers’ fingertips enabling data-based collaboration and decision making.
PSA software eliminates manual and error-prone resource capacity planning. It unlocks your managerial capacity from spreadsheet updating and reconciling.
It improves the accuracy and timeliness of your core operational process of resource capacity planning.
It puts you back on top.
More on the subject
Resource allocation for successful project management Part – 1
Resource allocation for successful project management Part -2
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Why resource management is emerging as a strategic capability for project businesses?
