Making the best use of resources is one of the most sought-after skills expected of project managers. By managing resources properly, projects can be implemented more efficiently and profitably.
We have 4 promising tips to take your resource management to the next level.
What is resource management?
Resource management is all about planning and deploying resources to increase efficiency.
What are the main resources involved in project management?
- Personnel
- Money
- Work equipment
- Infrastructure
- Time
But now for 4 key and applicable tips on how to take your resource management to the next level!
1. Develop a structure
No matter what stage your business is at, you should take enough time to create a strategic outline structure where you set your goals and define measurable components for them.
Here are some questions that will help you clarify how to allocate your resources:
- What do you want to achieve with your team?
- How will you measure success?
- Are you working on the right things with your team?
- What won’t help you succeed?
2. Plan for the unplanned
We don’t really like ad hoc requests. However, depending on the project, they happen regularly. An opportunity may arise at the last minute that requires support.
However, the typical reaction is that the work gets completely out of hand and you can no longer focus on the task at hand. Consequently, you become increasingly unhappy as you feel like time is running away from you and you lose track of the deadlines of what should be an important project.
The solution: include ad hoc work as part of your ressource management plan!
If you track your team’s work (with timeghost, of course – wink), you can get a good idea of how much time is usually spent on last-minute requests. If that number is around 20%, you should factor that into your ressource plan.
Logically, this means that you’ll probably be able to schedule your team members less heavily. However, factoring in ad hoc requests gives you a more realistic picture of how the project will ultimately play out and how much your team is capable of delivering.
Source: Gartner
3. Consider side effects
During the project, the most important thing is to keep perspective and find clarity or answers to the following questions:
- How much work has been done so far?
- Is there a forecast for the coming weeks?
- How is the work progressing?
- Is the existing team sufficient to successfully implement the project?
- Will additional staff be needed, and if so, what expertise do the new colleagues need to bring to the table?
With our project time recording tool, these questions can be partially answered!
Through our filter functions in the dashboard, you get clear insights into the working hours of team members and can draw conclusions for the future direction of the project.
How timeghost optimizes the resource management of your project:
- Recording the working hours of you and your team members
- Assignment of working hours to the corresponding project and a task contained therein
- Deposit of budgets for projects in timeghost
- Deposit of hourly wages for employees
- Individual assignment of tasks to selected team members
- Measurement of project profitability
All these data can be displayed in clear graphs and lists and help you to use the resources time, money and personnel in an optimal way.
Try it out and work with your team even more efficiently! Here you can test timeghost with all features 14 days for free!
4. Record working hours of your employees
This is really easy with timeghost:
Record how long you and your team need for repeatable work projects and evaluate them afterwards. Above all, you don’t have to do almost anything. Your working hours are partially recorded automatically and displayed directly in timeghost as a time entry. With just a few clicks you have tracked your working times and can then have them evaluated by the software.
This allows you to constantly optimize and adjust your projects.
Conclusion
With the right scheduling of your resources you can set the framework to be successful in the project afterwards and, above all, constantly work on optimizing the operational activities of you and your team. With a time tracking tool like timeghost, you have new and versatile evaluation options with which you can implement your projects even more efficiently and better.
Get the timeghost Teams App
All you need to do is install the Teams App directly from the AppSource Store in the application. The app includes all the features you know from the web client, and since you use your Microsoft 365 account to access timeghost, you’ll be done in seconds.
timeghost integrated with the Cisco Webex App
Recently, we have also been able to integrate timeghost into the Cisco Webex application. Here you can download and install the app directly.
