Three Trends Driving Resource Management Automation Today
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast features Randy Mysliviec, President and CEO at RTM Consulting and the managing director of the Resource Management Institute (RMI). This episode, hosted by Brent Trimble, focuses on the results of RMI’s survey on Resource Management Automation Tools and Solutions. Brent and Randy dive into the emerging trends driving resource management today and what these trends reveal about the future for professional services organizations.
Below, you’ll find three of the many trends from the RMI research report discussed in the episode. The results of the report are calculated based on survey responses from a variety of organizations utilizing billable resources. According to Randy, the goal of the survey is to “build a trends database for resource management automation tools.” These trends suggest the direction businesses are heading and the key priorities today surrounding resource management. If you’d like to learn more about the results of the RMI report, including additional trends, challenges, and actionable insights for how to address them, you can check out the episode and transcript here.
1. Mature Organizations Recognize the Importance of Resource Management
The top-performing organizations have reached a point of maturity where they understand that success and scale are only possible with a firm handle on the entire resource management process. In professional services — where your people are your most valuable asset — getting the right talent on the right project is non-negotiabl
According to Randy, “We’re finally starting to see a wave of companies who got in early, said ‘Okay, this resource management thing’s important. We want to get better at it, we wanna buy a tool, and build a process.’ A lot of them have matured to the stage now where they have the fundamentals down…They’ve figured out this ‘right person, right place, right time’ has a lot of positive impacts on their project performance.”
Organizations that manage billable resources see the need for a streamlined resource management process, but also recognize they don’t have to tackle it alone. Most mature businesses that are optimizing their resource management processes are aware that tools exist to help them along the journey, and are frankly a necessity to remaining competitive today.
Businesses are asking for resource management automation solutions that reduce inefficiencies and allow resource managers to spend time on the things that matter. Randy explains the increased demand for tools that provide automated staffing capabilities, “People want tools now where instead of having to pick the whole project team, they can let the system pick the easier ones so that the resource managers can spend time on more complex project staffing.” Successful services organizations today recognize the major impact resource management has on wider business profitability and success, and are becoming increasingly aware that technology can help them get there.
2. Businesses Continue to Depend on Spreadsheets
The RMI report on resource management automation is now in its 22nd year, and one trend that continues to exist amongst organizations using billable resources is a huge dependency on spreadsheets. According to Randy, “If you’ve picked the right tool, you’ve got the right processes built… your dependencies on spreadsheets should have been dramatically reduced from where they may have been four or five years ago. 71% of our respondents today said they’re still using spreadsheets to manage resources.”
Spreadsheets once provided services organizations with a solution to organize the data surrounding projects and resources, but are today considered an archaic and ineffective tool to assign and schedule resources. Many businesses are still managing resources across disconnected, siloed, and unreliable spreadsheets. Managing resources today is simply too complex, with too many moving parts, to be handled across multiple versions of the truth.
Randy shares, “We find the continued use of spreadsheets concerning. Why is it that those capabilities do exist today in these tools, but yet we’re still relying on the spreadsheets from the past? This trend — and it’s persistence across the years — reveals there are still advances to be made, and more awareness required across services organizations as a whole to replace spreadsheets with more modern, reliable, and supportive tools with built-in resource management capabilities.”
3. Organizations Demand Advanced Functionality from Resource Management Tools
Services are hitting a point of maturity where the previous processes, systems, and best practices surrounding resource management have dramatically changed. This has resulted in an increased demand for automation. Services businesses are asking for comprehensive, modern, and purpose-built tools that enable an efficient, profitable, and scalable resource management process.
According to Randy, “Respondents are asking for more advanced capabilities like automated staffing and more support for their BI and artificial intelligence requirements. So AI is an example for automated staffing… where the application provides 80% of your project team so that your resource managers can spend the time on filling the gaps that might remain.” Today, businesses are looking for technology that not only supports them along the resource management process, but one that will simultaneously improve utilization while delivering increased value to clients.
Ultimately, organizations want to be able to get their best-fit and most cost-effective resources on projects without delay or last minute scheduling scrambles. Services businesses want tools that automate many of the time-consuming, administrative tasks associated with resource management. They want to be able to make the best use of their talent, while improving utilization, margins, and ultimately profits.
Want to Learn More?
To find out how these trends are impacting the professional services industry and more specifically, which tools are being used to optimize resource management, you can listen to the entire 30-minute episode or read the full transcript here. Subscribe to the The Professional Services Pursuit Podcast for expert advice, trends, and best practices surrounding professional services. To access the entire RMI report, other research, and courses they offer, follow this link.