3 ways to improve resource management for your projects
As you initiate any project of sufficient complexity or scope, balancing resources across both your organization and the lifecycle of the project is key. In this post, we’re going to discuss elements of planning, assigning and managing that are crucial to your project’s success.
Common to all stages, however, is an immediate and ongoing need for data. Real-time data allows you as a project owner to maintain proper resource allocation and balance, making adjustments as needed and executing without delay.
The growth and sophistication of modern products like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation (PSA) has helped integrate all pipelines of a project’s data, integrating the critical management domains of sales, resource management, and service delivery. With real-time data at your fingertips, it becomes possible to maintain resource balance and improve productivity in even the most complicated of projects.
Beyond that, let’s take a look at three areas of focus for improving resource management.
1. Collaborate in planning
Collaboration is important throughout a project’s lifecycle, but in the planning phases it becomes essential. Sales managers, project managers and all key project personnel need to work very closely together to estimate, define, and scope the work ahead using data based in past experience or project templates.
The team must determine cost, effort, and sales value of the work during the proposal process and, where possible, visualize those components to enable efficient sharing, understanding, and comparison. This helps ensure credible estimate-to-completion planning and financial integrity.
2. Empower your team to assign resources
Once a plan is established, resources must be assigned before the project can begin.
Empower your staff and team members to play vital roles in resource allocation through transparency and insights, giving them ownership of appropriate project needs. Not only does this help ensure right roles and right skills are assigned through a more granular managerial approach, it can also increase job satisfaction and improve retention.
3. Manage resources through data and adaptation
Managing resources is an ongoing, continually changing effort, and keeping a project on-track once it has begun can be one of the most taxing phases of the process. Even though a thorough and integrated plan has been created and the right resources have been allocated to the right endeavors, things will change. Agility still applies. This is where real-time data and collaboration offer great benefits.
As you collect and analyze resource data on a weekly or even daily basis, be sure to synchronize across all facets of your project. Then provide a method of tracking progress and allocation that uses a variety of easily compared metrics. The more visual, the better.
Much like the planning phase, here again collaboration takes on an important role. Communicate and collaborate with key project personnel to ensure you are all able to adapt to changing information, needs, and goals.
How process determines project success
Every company, every project, every team is different. But by focusing on the core areas of collaborative planning, delegated resource assignment, and adaptive resource management, you can improve the process that determines your projects’ profitability and ultimate success.
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