How do you define and implement your resource management process?
August 24, 2023
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4 min
Any organization is made up of resources and projects. The challenge, and the difficulty, lies in executing current projects and developing new ones, taking into account both current and future resources.
If, for example, your consultancy wants to extend its range of services to include artificial intelligence, you'll need to have a very clear picture of the resources available to you at any given time (cash flow, customer portfolio, recurrence of customer requests, ability and desire of your consultants to upgrade their skills, etc.) in order to estimate the resources you'll need to carry out this project.
In other words, you need to be able to control your resource management. The aim is to control risk-taking without restricting your ambitions.
But as much as this new adventure in resource management will transform your firm for good, it will also require you to grasp the different steps to follow, and the tools needed to make it a success.
The aim of this article is to support you in this transformation, by presenting the building blocks of a resource management process that works, as well as the tools needed to deploy it.
First things first. To manage resources, you need to know what resources you need to manage.
The first step in your resource management is to identify your operational and strategic skills, budget, technological tools and methodologies - in short, your resources...
In a consultancy firm ill-versed in the subject, a simple spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets might seem sufficient a priori to collect this data. But the ideal solution is to use a tool tool dedicated to resource management and assignment to automatically take into account quantitative and qualitative changes in these resources.
The use of resource management software software is all the more essential as the next step is to allocate these resources. Here again, the field teaches us that resource allocation is rarely, if ever, set in stone.
A backlog on a particular project, or the sudden strategic importance of a particular assignment, may justify you reassigning your consultants, for example.
Your resource management system must therefore also be able to take these changes into account, if possible in real time, and allow you to easily visualize the resources available at any given moment.
Perpetually readjusting your resource allocation can be tedious and time-consuming. That's why it's imperative to learn from your experience and understand what works well and what doesn't so well.
Analyzing data from previous missions and the resources allocated, or even reallocated, will tell you, for example, that a certain type of project actually requires more time and more skills in order to be deployed.
The resource forecasting phase is therefore designed to help you better anticipate the resources you'll need to meet your customers' commitments on time... and on budget.
And incidentally, this data analysis and the resulting anticipation will enable you not only to control your recruitment, but also to keep your inter-contract rate as low as possible.
As substance is of little value without form, all these lessons learned from your previous resource management operations need to be conveyed clearly, and if possible visually, by your resource management tool.
Reporting is therefore the final step in your resource management process. Here again, you'll benefit from real-time feedback, and therefore reporting, so that you can identify any project slippage, for example, as soon as it occurs.
While processizing your resource management undeniably enables you to professionalize and streamline your day-to-day work, you'll soon realize, as we've pointed out throughout this article, that resource management is also a question of tools.
Your resource management requires you to collect, collate, dispatch, cross-reference, analyze and even connect data (skills, availability, development requirements, employee TJM, tool allocation, etc.).
You can choose from 3 types of tools:
Take the case of Napta. From project tracking and management functions to those enabling you to centralize all the needs of your business units as well as the ability to connect your other tools, such as your ERP or CRM, the software, although not custom-built for your firm, covers almost all the use cases of assignment.
For any company wishing to operate optimally on a daily basis, but also to grow serenely, the resource management is simply an essential step. But there can be no efficiency without processes and tools.
By defining how your resource management is to operate across the five phases outlined above (the identification, allocation, utilization, forecasting and reporting stages of your resource management), and by equipping yourself with tools designed and built specifically for this task at assignment, you greatly increase your chances of successful resource management.
Would you like to find out more? We've got plenty of resources to help you go further.
To complement this topic, find our checklist "Making your digital transformation project a success every time".
See also our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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