Do you have the most competent team but still the results aren’t what you expected? Hiring the most talented and experienced resources may not just resolve everything. Efficient resource planning and knowing how to use each resource in the best possible manner is the key. You may be doing even that, but the key feature in all successful projects is effective planning and optimally utilizing the resources available.

This enables organizations to accomplish their business objectives, stay ahead of the curve, and garner profits. Wondering how that is possible? Implementing the right resource planning software helps get a realistic view of projects and resources in real time. This helps in planning the best-fit team members for various tasks, analyzing the time and effort they’re putting into various projects, and determining the status of tasks and project completion.

Resource Planning: Overview

So, let’s understand the definition of resource planning first. The process of categorizing all the tasks and sub-tasks under a project and allocating them to your team members based on their skills, experience, expertise, availability, and interest is called resource planning. This not only involves assigning tasks and projects to human resources but also allocating non-human resources to various projects with the main purpose of maximizing efficiency. Therefore, resource planning enables managers to plan and execute the projects while optimally utilizing each team member’s strengths and time to attain capacity optimization.

How does Resource Planning Software Help in Keeping Projects on Track?

1. Effective and detailed planning

Imagine handling a team, managing project execution for various projects, team members in different locations, schedules, stakeholders, etc. Planning your projects in a detailed and efficient manner while ensuring that each task and activity is defined properly, the right resources are identified, and the right time or effort is calculated is no easy thing. Resource planning software helps to do things right from the first step, which is project planning. Be it estimating the type and number of people required for a project to the competencies needed, the feasible schedule, and listing any dependencies, a resource planning software streamlines the process for you.

2. Configurability based on specific requirements

Cloud-based resource planning software is highly configurable and has advanced filters, fields, views, and forms that aid in the effective management of projects and resources. You can do complex tasks like resource planning, and allocation, find an individual or team’s utilization, and a lot more in a few clicks. Additionally, if there are specific requirements, you can alter the custom-defined fields accordingly and also manage several working calendars for different locations.

3. Resource availability reports

To manage the operations, a project manager requires accurate information about the available budget, knowledge of resource availability, and developing project plans. Rather than using spreadsheets that can provide inaccurate or erroneous data, implementing the right capacity planning tools gives you accurate insight into availability reports to check if the required people are available on particular timelines. This data is updated automatically and you can check it in real-time to do accurate project and resource planning, evaluate the team’s capacity to take on new projects, and a lot more.

4. Project and resource data on a centralized location

While working in a remote or distributed team, it’s difficult to share data or large files, ensure versioning issues don’t happen, and find the right people for different projects across teams located in different geographies. But with resource planning software, sharing or reviewing data, dashboards, reports, or finding the availability of a resource becomes a cakewalk.

5. Assign the best people to the right projects and activities

It’s difficult to manually keep track of what each team member is good at and what their interests and experiences are. Imagine gaining clear visibility on each team member’s experience, skill set, interest, availability, and schedule by using the advanced filters of a tool and getting your answers in a single view. What’s more? Resource planning software enables checking and monitoring the utilization of all resources and as a team in just a few clicks. This helps in identifying and then aligning the most fitting talent to the right projects and activities.

6. Set priority for deliveries

While managing various projects, setting priorities in terms of their milestones and deliveries is complex. Resource planning software enables breaking larger projects and tasks into smaller chunks and facilitates balanced workload distribution and setting the right priorities. Such a tool helps identify projects and tasks that need to be completed on high priority, which helps the project managers plan and focus on them.

7. Role-based permission and access levels

Resource planning software also helps to grant permission and access levels to the tool as per their roles and responsibilities. Cloud-based resource planning software aids in streamlining multiple projects and grants permission levels to resources based on their roles, responsibilities, designations, etc. This helps each resource to view the activities and tasks assigned, check schedules, and enter their time and effort on each task and project in their timesheets. Whereas the stakeholders or clients can be given just view-only access to take a look at the project status, reports, and dashboards. However, project leads and managers have to edit or create permission to design, and change project and resource plans, and timelines, create dashboards and reports, etc.

8. Monitor performance and cost in real-time

Resource planning software gets automatically updated in real-time, which in turn enables monitoring your team’s performance, utilization, and productivity on a day-to-day, weekly, or monthly basis. You can evaluate and track the status of multiple projects, schedule and reschedule resources, and make changes to a plan with just a few clicks. Therefore, resource planning software enables controlling the cost and timelines at every step and milestone, thus facilitating well-informed and data-driven decisions.