What Resource Management Solutions Will Work for Me?
For professional services teams to thrive, they require the unparalleled insight and control that only a purpose-built resource management solution can provide. When used well, a great resource management solution can help you keep track of the many moving parts across your projects, create timely and accurate reports, improve your team dynamics, and equip teams to navigate any potential obstacles.
If you’re new to the world of resource management software, you might be wondering where to start. This brief guide will provide you with answers to some of the most frequently asked questions, so you can immediately begin improving your professional services organization.
How Do I Maximize My Resource Utilization Rates?
Effective resource management requires resource managers to intimately know and understand the resources available to them so they can proactively manage day-to-day operations and work toward project completion. While this is simple in concept, once a project is in motion, it can be much harder to reconcile the shifting availability of different resources and balance that against the needs of the project as a whole. A strong resource management solution can provide full visibility into your resource capacity and capabilities, as well as a suite of tools to track and monitor project progress and change to make effective, timely decisions.
The key is finding a solution with comprehensive resourcing views designed to surface all relevant information about resource availability and project requirements in real-time — allowing for a more strategic assignment of resources to projects. This enables resource managers to proactively respond to changes in demand and supply and even predict how these changes will impact revenue, margins, and timelines.
How Do I Improve My Project Staffing Decisions?
Team building can be a complex resource management issue; especially when you have to build and balance multiple teams at the same time. It can be difficult to decide which team member should go where when they have skills that could be applied to multiple projects. You need a resource management solution that lets you explore trade-offs to find the best possible combinations.
Look for a resource management solution with tools like Kantata’s Team Builder, which is designed to address all these issues in a single resource management solution. Team Builder lets you configure your resource recommendations and evaluate multiple team compositions at once to determine the best fit for your projects. Additionally, users can see how various adjustments can impact performance and profit to accurately weigh options and make informed decisions.
How Do I Grow My Team’s Skills While On The Job?
Successful project managers are always looking for ways to help individual team members grow and acquire new skill sets. However, a constant influx of projects and deadlines can make it tempting to rely on tried and true skills, rather than providing opportunities to learn new ones. You need a resource management solution that can provide room for skill growth without sacrificing a project’s success.
Be sure to find a resource management solution that can surface insights on skills adjacency. With these insights, resource managers staffing projects will be able to see team members with adjacent skills to the ones they need, enabling them to better align skills with project demands and identify opportunities for skill acquisition and development. By providing skill insights about individual team members, managers can see what skills they already possess as well as what new skills would align well with their team role. Skills adjacency doesn’t just allow you to staff current projects, it allows you to invest in employee growth and create ideal team members years down the line.
How Can I Forecast and Prepare for Future Project Problems?
Once a project has been planned and is underway, project managers need to be able to anticipate future roadblocks and issues that may arise during the project timeline. The more accurate these forecasts are, the better equipped project managers will be to plan for contingencies or solutions that may need to be put in place. You need a resource management solution that can take present and past project information and use that data to accurately anticipate future issues.
Forecasting tools allow resource managers to plan for possibilities in the current project timeline while also collecting data to anticipate problems in future projects. Accurately estimate project timing, demands, and profitability as the project progresses in real time, giving managers the chance to course correct and minimize delays. Lean on forecasting tools to highlight problem areas to allow for ongoing improvement across projects.
Making The Most of Resource Management and More With Kantata
Adopting a modern resource management solution is often the first step to taking your professional services business to the next level, but resource management challenges can not be solved in isolation. Proactive resource management is only possible when decision-makers have timely, accurate data from across the business, with real-time visibility into pipeline, ongoing project progress, and capacity across the entire workforce. This is why the Kantata Professional Services Cloud was created, with Resource Center, Team Builder, Skills Adjacency, Forecasting, and other purpose-built tools providing an unparalleled level of insight and control to resource managers. Learn more about what Kantata can do for your business.