Resource Management – Getting Right Talent at Right Place!

Every organization has a unique requirement of skills and talent which suit their business processes, plan and culture. And with the growing trend of outsourcing, work has become project based, talent is now geographically dispersed; resources work from different locations and time zones. Managing these resources can be a pain as well as critical at the same time as it has a huge impact on schedules, budgets, resource levelling (keeping resources at hand level – not more, not less) and smoothing (ensuring project meets deadlines by increasing or decreasing resources).

If done correctly, resource management can generate most profitable projects. It helps you track, monitor and analyze any project at any time. Conflicts in resource management may hinder progress of projects, delay the projects, and increase in cost. This can be avoided by using a resource management tool.

Many organizations have started using automated tools to help manage their workforce. These tools help you forecast effort for a particular project, allocate right skills/talent to a project according to the project needs, maximize resource allocation/utilization give real time cost overview of the project and reduce the operational planning costs.

Features of a Resource Management Tool –

Forecasting

• Calculate project resource costs based on resource rating models
• Fix budget for a particular project
• Identify generic resource needs by project and to support steady-state business
• Plan effort against projects (existing/pipeline) for multiple periods based on strategic roadmaps
• Monitor/schedule planned work
• Assign people to projects for a hard book, with constraints on budget and time span.
• Perform scenario analysis and simulations on resource requirements according to different investment scenarios and different levels of available resources

Resource requesting

• Identify skills, FTEs required for the project
• Place resource request with a vendor against a project and skill required
• Vendor checks for the availability of resource and fulfill the request
• Capture the effort spent and analyze actual compared to forecasted effort through data provided by our time tracking capability

About Author:

Nisha Tolani is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. She is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Management Office projects. She can be contacted at: nisha.t@spluspl.com