Resource management – FAQ

Our recent Resource Management ‘Ask an Expert’ webinar session covered some of the key questions regarding how global resource management can work effectively, no matter what type of project process your business implements. Within the webinar, we answered many questions on resource management from our audience and have summarised them for you here so you can use it as your first point of call on all things resource management!

View link to webinar recording here.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is resource management?
   • Resource management is the process of planning, scheduling, allocating and tracking organisational and project resources.

2. Why is resource management important for your organisation?
   • It is critical managers have visible, accurate and up to date information at their fingertips to be able to efficiently plan, allocate and track their resource pool. Effective resource management processes will help you to fulfil your project, task, and organisational goals.

3. What are the biggest challenges in resource management?
   • Resource ownership: Dispersed data and inconsistent processes are likely to result in misunderstandings of available resources, and conflicting resource priorities.
   • Lack of resource visibility: By not being able to easily view resource availability or capacity, you are unable to efficiently plan for future resource allocations.
   • In constant firefighting mode: Unclear resource information often leads to project managers struggling to stay on top of, and up to date with, project work.
   • Never enough time: Having large volume of work in the pipeline with no clear understanding of resource availability, there is no way to accurately determine when project work can be achieved.
   • Manual data entry: On a large scale, repetitive manual tasks not only take up time, but they are also error prone.

4. What are the benefits of effective resource management?
   • Resource visibility: Ability to optimise resource utilisation by prioritising high value work with available resource capacity.
   • Work and resource optimisation: Knowing where resources are already assigned and if those allocations are appropriate.
   • Resource capacity planning (long term planning): Utilising data to reliably define actual timelines for future projects.
   • Eliminating the burn out effect: Being able to provide objective methods to prioritising work ensuring demand is balanced against capacity to deliver, therefore minimised risk of overworking resources.
   • Increase business value: Connecting strategy to execution and delivering programs that drive innovation and transformational change.

5. What are the consequences of poor resource management?
   • Ineffective resource management processes are likely to lead to poor productivity, delays, decreased quality, increased costs, missed opportunities, and low morale.

6. How do I get started with resource management?
   • It is important that before you begin investigating the most suitable tool for your organisation to help you with your resource management processes, you must:
     • Validate readiness
     • Understand your environment
     • Understand the capacity of resources
     • Understand demand
     • Address internal concerns via business use case

7. What tools do you need for resource management?
   • Using the right resource management tools for your organisation is essential. Organisations often rely on spreadsheets for resource management because of their ease of use, simplicity, and ability to set up a file quickly. However, keeping multiple or even shared spreadsheets up to date doesn’t scale well and often becomes impractical unless you have a project management solution collating the data from your various spreadsheets into one, easy to use, dashboard – like Altus does!

8. How does Altus optimise your resource management?
   • Resource management in Altus gives you global visibility of your current and future resource demand. It creates the umbrella for resource management across all your project schedules – whether traditional, Agile or hybrid – giving you optimisation of your current resource loads and the ability to accurately plan and make decisions about resourcing for future project requirements. Find out more here.

View our best practices video below to see how resource management can work for you, ensuring simplicity and transparency for your business processes.

If you’re not sure how to get started, reach out and let us show you how it can be done!

By Marc Soester

Executive Director

Marc Soester is an Executive Director at Sensei and has over 18 + Years experience in being a PPM and Work Management Subject Matter Expert​, he has been part of over 250 PPM ​implementations​ and is an Industry Standard Expert on PMI, P3O, Scaled Agile. Marc was also the first Microsoft Project MVP and is an active member of the Microsoft ​Product Advisory Council.