“It’s not only about resources, but also about resourcefulness” – Tony Robbins
A resource is a crucial asset in the organization whose primary role is to carry out specific project tasks. However, projects are bound by defined timelines and budgets, and thus, to ensure timely delivery, effective resource scheduling plays a vital role.
The project manager estimates the resource requirements and requests the resource manager to fulfill the same. Once the open positions are fulfilled, project managers schedules project resources on various tasks based on their competency, availability, cost, location, etc., ensuring they are neither over nor underutilized.
Thus, resource scheduling helps managers unleash the true potential of resources and ensure successful project completion. Furthermore, it also enhances business profitability and sustainability.
This post will walk you through the benefits of robust resource scheduling software and why organizations should use it. Let’s get started:
Contents
Why is resource scheduling important in project management?
Resource scheduling is a crucial element of resource planning. It helps managers deploy the right resources to the right task for a specific period. In addition, effective resource scheduling helps the project managers to track utilization levels and optimize the resources as per requirements.
Here are some reasons why resource scheduling is essential in project management –
- Schedule the resources to tasks based on skillset and availability
- Prevent overloading the resources with too many tasks
- Monitoring the progress from start to finish
- Analyze the utilization rate of the resources
- Track project estimation to make future scheduling easier
- Avoid unexpected deviations in the timeline, budget, and scope of the project
- Eliminate bottlenecks that hinder project performance
Without proper resource planning & scheduling, overutilized resources can feel burnt out or experience low morale due to insufficient work. As a result, the projects suffer from schedule and budget overruns or may even come to a halt.
Now, as you have understood the importance of resource scheduling in project management, let us go through some of the essential benefits of resource scheduling software.
Benefits of Resource Scheduling Software
Saviom’s robust resource scheduling solution provides data-driven foresight into critical metrics like – availability, capacity, utilization, etc., that help optimize the existing resource pool. Additionally, it helps in the successful delivery of projects, eventually increasing client satisfaction.
Following are the key benefits of implementing advanced resource scheduling software –
Gain real-time information on all resources
An organization may have competencies spanning across the enterprise. Managers need overall visibility of resources to check their schedules before assigning them to various tasks. Else, there can be scheduling conflicts for shared resources and chances of double booking in some cases.
Resource scheduling software consolidates all the resource-related information on a centralized repository. It keeps the managers informed of the capacity and availability of resources. 360-degree visibility ensures the allocation of competent resources and also allows to leverage cost-effective global resources across boundaries. Thereby ascertaining seamless project delivery.
Assign competent resources to suitable tasks
Inefficient scheduling of resources can negatively impact project completion and profitability. Therefore, assigning the right resource to the right task is critical in project management. Managers can identify the best-fit resources using the advanced filters of the tool. It helps to narrow down the resources by skills, experience, cost, qualifications, etc.
In addition, resource scheduling software maintains real-time competency insights that help to match resources with the right tasks. For enhanced profitability, one can even replace senior resources with junior members having the desired skillset and capability or share resources across all projects instead of deploying them to any high-priority one.
Maximize billable & strategic resource utilization
A project comprises multiple tasks that require specific skills to produce tangible results. It is the responsibility of the project manager to utilize the team members optimally. Billable utilization is the critical KPI for an organization to ensure profitability. One can achieve this by striking the right balance between billable and non-billable activities.
Resource scheduling software provides insights into strategic, billable, and non-billable utilization of resources. Project managers can ensure maximum utilization using the insights from heat maps and forecasts vs. actual reports. If there is an anomaly, the managers can take remedial actions such as mobilizing the resources from non-billable to billable activities. This way, they can improve the health index of the organization.
Optimize resource scheduling to enhance productivity
Optimizing the resource schedule is vital in regulating the project tasks while maintaining the workload. Often, the project managers need to adjust the start and finish dates of the project tasks to align them with resource availability.
Resource scheduling software helps create an optimized project resource plan. Once the project starts, the project manager can track the resource utilization levels, identify task delays, and even reshuffle the tasks. Based on the resource capacity, the project manager can adjust the project deadline or pull additional resources to redistribute the tasks without extending the timeline. Optimizing the resource schedule ensures desired productivity and successful completion of the project.
Ensure timely delivery of projects
In enterprise-level organizations, the key responsibility of the project manager is to align project delivery with client expectations. Therefore, assigning a competent resource at the right time is imperative. It ensures timely delivery and helps in achieving intended quality standards.
Resource scheduling software helps the project managers to negate the chance of assigning over or underqualified resources to the tasks. When the right resources give a head start to the project, all the deliverables of different project phases can be achieved without compromising quality. Furthermore, if there are any bottlenecks like – task dependency, low productivity, etc., the project manager can manage them promptly.
Conclusion
Resource scheduling solution provides various resource-related insights such as skills, availability, cost, etc., that help project managers assign the right resources to the right tasks. In addition, proper resource scheduling ensures that resources are not overloaded or under-utilized during the project execution. It also helps to enhance the productivity of the resources and maximize profitability.
Want to enhance your team productivity? Manage your resources efficiently and keep them on track with the best resource scheduling software.
