| At a glance Learn how to effectively manage resources in your IT company. This article outlines the essential steps. By taking these steps, your managers will be able to focus on actual resource planning instead of juggling spreadsheets. You will be able to overcome challenges like retaining and finding top talent, preventing employee burnout, and digital transformation. |
Resources
If you ask IT leaders to list the top challenges they face, you will find convergence on most of the following
Finding and retaining top talent
Improving security and building robust remote work environments
Pandemic-driven burnout of people
Gaps between required and existing skill sets and competencies
Digital transformation
Hybrid work environments
Chip shortage
You will agree that managing people resources well is essential for overcoming most of the above challenges. Every organization is engaged in capacity resource planning.
How to manage resources effectively?
Here are the essentials.
1.Build a repository of all project tasks and the skill sets they need
You will need to prepare work breakdown structures for your projects and prepare granular task lists. The tasks should be granular enough so that individual tasks can be completed in a time-bound manner by resources with designated skill sets.
You will need experienced project managers and senior technical people who have insights to build such task lists with needed skill sets.
2.Build a database of employees and their skill sets
Identify the skill sets and levels of proficiency of each employee. These skill sets should match the skill sets in the above repository. Input from your project managers will be essential to prepare a dependable database.
3.Prepare requirement plan for various skill sets
Using project plans as the basis, use the project task repository and prepare a requirement plan for all the resources. Proactive managers will include expected projects with high confidence levels of winning in this plan.
4.Allocate resources, track utilization, and rebalance
Allocate resources to specific projects and tasks as per project and task schedules. You will need to do this iteratively and rebalance resource loads for optimal allocation.
5.Prepare training and talent acquisition plan
Identify emerging gaps in the availability of resources and skills. You can use this to plan the training of employees as well as for acquiring talent.
6.Update the task repository and employee database periodically
As you execute projects and as you allocate and reallocate people you will learn many things. Document your experience and use it to fine-tune your task repository.
Use employee performance on specific tasks for updating their skill set database. If implemented and maintained well, the employee skill set database can be used for more detailed and objective feedback to the employees.
7.Perfect, but what is the ground reality?
You have an HR system that keeps track of employee data. You have a project management system. You combine the information from these to plan your resource allocation. You do these using spreadsheets and based on data drawn from both the above systems.
As new projects come and as existing projects progress, your managers update their spreadsheets. Employees going on leave, quitting, or joining and changes in project schedules need constant updating of your spreadsheets. Your managers struggle to remain on top of the situation.
If you want your managers to focus on effective capacity planning instead of juggling their spreadsheets, you need an enterprise-class resource management system to start with and build it further into a full-fledged professional services automation (PSA) platform.
ProductDossier has a suite of professional services software (PSA) having modules like Opportunity & Proposal Management, Project Management, Resource Management, Timesheet & Leave Management, and Project Financials, which integrate well with your existing software applications like ERP, CRM, and HRMS. ProductDossier PSA establishes unbroken digital workflows for the entire opportunity-to-cash (O2C) cycle.
It also eliminates the need for the cumbersome use of Excel spreadsheets. To know how to get in touch with us at sales@productdossier.com
