Leveraging Kantata Tools to Assist with Strategic Resource Management

In our previous blog, “Data Governance: The Secret to Great Resource Management,” we discussed the importance of having strong data governance models, data selection, and maintenance strategies in a modern professional services company.

Ultimately, this data helps resource management offices make strategic decisions with a level of objectivity. And while it may seem challenging to turn data into decisions, your competitors are already leveraging their data to gain an advantage. The sooner your business starts leveraging data, the sooner you can more effectively compete in your market.

However, businesses can’t take advantage of quality data at scale without leveraging tools that automate repetitive aspects of the decision-making process and that surface key insights to resource managers. These outcomes can include increasing project success and profitability while saving you time to ensure deadlines are met.

But what tool is right for your resource management strategy? At Kantata, we’ve created purpose-built solutions designed to assist in every resource management need.

Finding the Right Resources With Kantata

As an AI-powered resource management solution, Kantata is designed to leverage resource data to assist with staffing decisions that focus on ensuring successful, profitable, and on-time projects.

Kantata Resource Recommendations automate the work of putting the right person with the right skills on the right job at the right time. Capturing demand and supply data for open roles and individual resources allows Kantata to offer the best available resources to complete work. This prevents the user from searching through all resources at the firm to check criteria, such as availability, skills fit, location, language requirements, cost impacts, and more. Users can have up to 15 recommended resources appear for each open role with the matches sorted by strongest fit.

Recommendations are based on the following criteria:

• Role Match – Title needed for the open role
• Availability – Amount of time the resource has available to fulfill the project assignment
• Skills Match – Required skills for the open role and the level of proficiency required
• Custom Fields – Common fields include employee type, location, language, etc.
• Cost Impact – Relative to the average cost rate of the role at your organization

Kantata uses a proprietary algorithm to generate match scores for each potential candidate. Users can define the weighting of importance for various fields to tailor the logic to your preference. When combined with a centralized data governance model, companies can leverage their resources even more effectively.

New Success With Resource Recommendations

Resource recommendations are effective for staffing individual resources regardless of how you conduct staffing – by project or by role.

This technology can be applied at scale to get resource recommendations for all open roles on a project or for all open staffing needs for a specific role (i.e. project manager) across all your projects through the use of Team Builder. This helps you get a more holistic view of the top matches to put together a project staffing plan. Team Builder provides you with detailed information on the match data for the requested open role and you can see how it aligns with the recommended resource. Users can then override recommendations and make adjustments to put together their team.

The availability inspector allows you to drill into the calendars of your resources and view potential conflicts to reduce mid-project switching and help you make decisions around project start dates or adjustments to the schedule of the resource to ensure on-time delivery and resource consistency. 

New and Upcoming Capabilities

At Kantata, we’re always working to provide new tools that support our users’ needs.

The Team Builder feature allows users to take any role at an organization with unnamed resources and get recommendations for each of those unnamed resources. Users can leverage Team Builder across multiple projects to understand the tradeoffs of resourcing decisions and get recommendations on how to optimize your staffing decisions to increase project success and profitability.

With strong insights and optimized teams, professional services businesses can implement a centralized resource management approach that helps maintain a strong strategy for long-term success.

Want to learn more about how Kantata can help support your resource management needs?