Building the Best Resource Management System
To save money and maximize profits, your business needs to manage its resources properly. Today’s modern resource management tools make getting the most out of your teams easier than ever, and best of all, you don’t need to create a patchwork of multiple software solutions to build the best system.
That’s why Kantata created a comprehensive resource management system, ensuring the software capabilities you need to maximize your resources are all in one place. However, what to look out for in resource management tools and how to make them essential parts of the larger software ecosystem is critical to the success of these modern pieces of technology. Each of the following elements are a necessary resource management tool in the resource manager’s tool belt and are waiting for your teams to put them to their full use.
Tool #1: Resource Optimization
When considering which resource management system is right for you, look for tools that will help you dynamically optimize the resources available to you at your company. With Kantata driving resource optimization, you can see an accurate view of what capacity you have available to you for each month and manage your resources in real time. This resource management tool enables you to see where project demand and resource capacity are misaligned in upcoming months, so you can build and enact strategies that fix demand problems before they happen.
Tool #2: Resource Center
The best resource management systems give their users a central base of operations to plan out the resource needs of their projects in advance. Kantata Resource Center is a visual interface where you can manage resource planning and staffing, from refining resource needs, to filling open roles, to making adjustments as project needs and resource availability changes.
Resource Center helps you:
- Properly staff your projects
- Set foundational resourcing strategies
- Allot resources to tasks
Plus, performance history data can be used to update templates and create suggestions to improve your resource management. The insights provided by this piece of the resource manager’s tool belt help you quickly address changes in demand and supply, test how resource changes impact revenue and timelines, and receive optimized resource recommendations for your company.anges in demand and supply, test how resource changes impact revenue and timelines, and receive optimized resource recommendations for your company.
Tool #3: Team Builder
Even if certain people get along well at your company, it can be difficult to know in advance which skill sets work best together. But when you staff projects with Team Builder (a subset of Resource Center), you can use resource recommendations to help you staff a whole project or a specific role needed across multiple projects. Team Builder finds candidates based on their skills, availability, and other criteria that you can personalize to perfectly suit your needs.
Team Builder enables you to:
- See across your resource pool – internal and external – to make an informed decision
- Try out different combinations of people and plans and compare them to see what will work best
- Figure out how each configuration of people affects your company’s overall performance and profits
A resource management tool meant to put your team members in more effective configurations can naturally lead to improved performance and utilization as a result.
Tool #4: Skills Adjacency
A good resource management system needs to help you refine your understanding of what your team excels at now and what they could be capable of in the future. With Skills Adjacency, you can input the skills your team members currently have and their level of experience.
Skills Adjacency allows you to use those inputs to:
- Match skills with project demands
- Point out which employees can improve in certain areas
- Pair people based on skills to learn from each other
When you can see each employee’s skills, you can better understand them as a contributor – where they’ve been and where they’re going in their career. And you want to invest in them so that when they grow, your company grows as well.
Tool #5: Resource Forecasting
Forecasting tools are a critical element in any resource management system. While you can’t predict the future, you can use these tools to see data-backed recommendations and predictions for your projects, and for your overall resource needs.
There are several ways forecasting resource management tools help drive resource optimization:
- Preliminary Forecasting: Use resource reports to create a data-informed project timeline, so you can create a reasonable plan for what tasks need to be completed and in what order.
- Real-Time Predictions: As the project gets started, you can make updates to your project with real-time predictions of changes that need to be made to counter any negative trends.
- Smarter Forecasting: When you input projects into resource forecasting tools, you can take data gleaned from previous projects to improve upcoming ones.
- Forecasting For Simultaneous Projects: Since most companies have more than one project going, you need to be able to track resources across multiple projects to understand the health of your company as a whole.
These future insights will take a professional services organization from constantly dealing with unpredictable changes to confidently making long-term plans.
Make The Most of Your Team With Kantata Resource Management Tools
When you choose the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, you get everything talked about in this article and more. So contact Kantata today to see what the transformative power of Kantata can do for your business.