The Ultimate Guide to Business Resource Management

When have you packed your bag for a trip last time? It’s probably been a long time due to the current pandemic. But still recalling those sweet moments won’t be so difficult.

Before going on a trip we always try to get the most necessary things with us. In simple words, this is called resource management- use as few resources as possible and arrange them accordingly to accomplish the goal.

Well, for business, things are not this simple always. Business Resource Management requires a complete understanding of the company’s goals and available assets. That ensures the supply of essential elements including people, time, space, money, knowledge, and other appliances when and where they’re needed. So that all the projects get delivered on time and budget. It lets you do more with less.

Let’s explore more and shed some light on how to manage and distribute the resources inside your business effectively. Then we’ll close up by introducing a reliable project management tool. It’ll minimize your hassle in terms of team management.

Table of Content:

• What is Business Resource Management
• Types of Resource Management
• Why is Resource Planning Important
• Best Practices for Business Resource Management
  1. Embrace the 80/20 Rule with Employee Talent
  2. Establish a Centralized Resources Pool
  3. Apply a Common Project Management Methodology
  4. Resource Management is a Continuous Process
  5. Plan Around the Availability of Constrained Resources
  6. Account for Non-Project Time
  7. Avoid or Limit multi-tasking
  8. Make Your Resources More Productive
• WP Project Manager- An Interactive Team management Tool
• Summary

Let’s start with the basic-

What is Business Resource Management?

Resource management is the efficient and effective deployment and allocation of an organization’s resources. Those resources can be intangible – human and time or it can be tangible – properties, equipment, objects, budget, etc.

Resource management is essential for long- or short-term projects of any kind because the final deliverable is only as good as the team and assets you’ve assembled. The right team working on the project is fundamental to its success

Fiona Remley – business operations and program management expert

The goal of resource planning is to utilize 100% of the resources of an organization. It includes all the processes of running projects smoothly that lead to achieving your company goals.

Fundamentally, people who are assigned to your project should be capable to work together and skilled to complete it successfully. Resource management, however, not only covers the process of allocation. It also includes managing and monitoring all resources throughout the project and reacting positively to the changes.

Resources are people, place, money, equipment or anything else that you need in order to do all of the activities that you planned for.

Types of Resource Management

Every organization has a set of assets that can be used when planning or managing a project. Resource management aids to plan, organize, and control these facilities accordingly. It’s a broad category of management as opposed to discipline in itself.

The following list describes different types of resource management with examples-

• Human Resources: Employee is the main resource for any company. Managing team members is concerned with recruiting, onboarding, training and development, payroll, benefits, compliance with labor regulations, and others. It also includes performance management, safety and welfare, and staff motivation as well.
• Project Resource Management: Align all the tasks and team members collaboratively to achieve the predefined goal in a strategic way. Adjust the deadlines and balance between demand for resources and available supply. So that you can finish the project in a limited time frame.
• Natural Resource Management: Take care of natural assets like soil, land, water, plants, and animals to ensure that they’ll be available for the future generation.
• Infrastructure Management: Managing foundational structures like roads, bridges, electrical grids, and sewers including deployment and maintenance.
• Financial Resource Management: It deals with all the events related to money including assets (cash, stock, bonds, etc.) and liabilities (loans, installments, tax, etc.).
• Facility Management: Managing a facility like an office building, data center, warehouse, hospital, and so forth.
• Inventory Management: Control and optimization of inventory to maximize business profit and create satisfied clients.
• IT Service Management: Operating information technology assets and services of a company, often by a third party via an SLA-based contract. 
• Enterprise Asset Management: Handling the capital assets of an organization.
• Public Asset Management: Overseeing the capital assets of a nation, region, city, state, or country.
• Digital Asset Management: Directing digital assets like corporate documents, media, and others.

Why is Resource Planning Important in Project Management?

A business is said to be technically efficient if it can produce the maximum output with the minimum inputs- such as labor, capital, and technology. That essentially means, using the right resources at the right time on the right tasks.

Resource management helps us to do exactly the same!

It lets the project managers know what and where the resources are working. So that they can make more realistic decisions to attain business goals within a limited budget and standard time frame.

Advantages of Business Resource Management

1. Avoid Unforeseen Hiccups: Identifying your resources’ availability and how to use them, you can troubleshoot the gap and bottlenecks before they happen.
2. Prevent Burnout: Effective resource management allows you to resolve conflicts caused by the over-allocation of resources.
3. Create a Safety Net: Proper resource planning can do wonders for your business if implemented in the right manner. It can minimize the project failure rate by ensuring adequate use of resources.
4. Builds Transparency: Everyone will get a clear overview of your team members’ activities. That makes it easy to decide whether your team is fully occupied or able to take a new project soon.
5. Measures Efficiency: By analyzing your requirements to run an upcoming project successfully, you can practically set the strategies to maximize ROI.

8 Best Practices for Business Resource Management

Let’s know the best ways for optimal resource optimization-

1. Embrace the 80/20 Rule with Employee Talent

You can employ the “Pareto’s Principle” to encourage growth and engagement inside your business. Never forget that a team of potential employees can fuel your business growth remarkably. Thus employee management is the key element to ensure your company success using all available resources efficiently.

Implement 80/20 rule in your business plan, that means 80% of the responsibility and work of your company/a specific project are shouldered by only 20% of your associated team members. These are the most knowledgable employees in your company. You can use this rule in other sections of your organization to produce 80% of the effects from 20% of the causes.

2. Establish a Centralized Resources Pool

Operate and assign the resources from a base point to ensure the fair distribution of resources among all projects. It lets you respond to a problem quickly and construct a solution by allocating resources first to high-priority tasks.

Apart from this, project managers should follow an effective evaluation process to figure out the problem areas.

• Identify those events that are not managed appropriately but they could be if they had their required resources.
• Prioritize your tasks and projects, and then deliberately assign the resources to support KPIs and align with business goals.

Also, don’t over-allocate your resources, otherwise it may create issues in your final output.

3. Apply a Common Project Management Methodology Throughout the Company

There are different types of works in an organization. A number of small or large groups perform these tasks under the project supervisor.

Although project managers can use some constructive methods that are designed to fit a specific type of management style or project. It’s however, important to choose an option that offers the greatest benefit to your system over the other available solutions.

A specific methodology consists of several processes and you need some tools to perform these actions properly. It’s better to choose a technique you already have the tools. This will minimize your investing cost. Just make sure that all the processes and tools are capable to work together in terms of retaining the business goal.

4. Don’t Forget Resource Management is a Continuous Process

Resource management is not a short term event. Rather it’s an ongoing process of managing and allocating resources in the best possible way.

Over time, your company must go through a lot of changes in response to evolving business context and other factors as well. Though responding to changes in a business environment can be quite daunting. But you and your team should work together to adopt these changes positively.

Firstly, you have to understand the causes and effects of the current situation. Then set your priority and resolve all the issues according to the business needs. Remember, all processes involved in resource management should run continuously.

5. Plan Around the Availability of Constrained Resources

Find out which resources are in short supply and then focus on them. Set your strategy around their availability throughout the life of each project. So you can maximize resource usages and prevent delays. Moreover, plan to increase those limited resources you may need in the future.

Project managers should have a strong grip over all the activities that could affect the project deadline. In fact, it’s his duty to ensure that there are sufficient resources to run the project within the specified time frame.

6. Account for Non-project Time

Track non-project time to prevent over-allocation of resources and avoid delays in the deadline. When planning for a project must account for the administrative time, paid time off, etc. Also, set some strategies to deal with the uncertainty in business during resource planning – otherwise, you can’t calculate a realistic time span for your projects.

Evidently, there will be a natural time loss for some daily activities or emergency cases such as administrative tasks (e.g. email, report, general meetings, etc.)

7. Avoid or Limit Multi-tasking

Though multitasking sounds efficient but sometimes it lowers the overall productivity of a project. So, limit the number of parallel activities to let the resources perform well. In addition, you can allow different work styles throughout the business to increase efficiency.

8. Upgrade Your Employee Skills to Make Them More Productive

You must ensure employee security and offer them fair compensation based on their performance. Also, you can arrange training and session for their further advancement. It’ll upgrade them to work with new technologies. So you need not hire new resources every time for a new project. This will surely save both your money and time. And you’ll see a positive impact on your yearly turnover and productivity due to this interactive approach.

Lets move to the next part and figure out how to-

Improve Your Employee Management System With the Right Project Management Tool

WP Project manager is a simple yet effective solution to operate all project management activities like a pro. With this WordPress solution, you can plan, organize, and track your projects right from your WordPress dashboard.

WP Project Manager is an all-in-one project management solution for WordPress users. That comes with powerful features like Team Discussion, Milestone, Gantt Chart, Email Notification, Calendar, and much more.

This project organizing tool supports more than 10,000 projects worldwide to manage their project-related task accordingly. User-friendly interface and web-based task management features make it popular among WordPress users. In short, it gives you a strong grip over your business.

During this global pandemic, you can manage your remote team seamlessly from home using WP Project Manager!

WP Project Manager can be the glue to hold all the resources, opportunities, and company goals align in a disciplined and strategic way. Without doing further ado, extend your team collaboration and create a better workplace for them with this task management tool. It can be a secret strategy to multiply your profits minimizing your workload!

To fulfill your growing business’s advanced needs and to govern a large team effortlessly you can unlock premium features of WP Project Manager. Though the core version of this management tool is capable to manage work and deliver projects timely.

You may also like: How We Are Managing Remote Teams With WP ERP.

Summary

More often than not, projects fail because we don’t have the right skills or resources available at the right time. So it won’t be possible sometimes to deliver the projects on time. Resource management, however, involves planning and organizing all the things appropriately. That means using the right resources at the right time on the right tasks.

Using an effective business resource management system, you can-

• Ensure resource visibility & understanding
• Improve business value
• Spot problems earlier in the process
• Increase the project success rate

Also, it makes you able to identify true resource availability. So you can ensure maximum utilization of resources at the project in the most efficient way possible. Therefore, it raises your chance to deliver all the tasks within the defined time frame.

Use the comment section below if you have any feedback about business resource management or its implementation.