Resource Management Best Practices That Make Businesses Thrive

Resource management drives organizational progress. Adhering to robust resource management best practices is crucial for effective planning, organization, and utilization of project management resources. Implementing these practices ensures projects are completed on schedule, boosts team productivity, and helps maintain competitive advantages.

In this article, we detail these practices, provide actionable tips for implementation, and highlight the benefits of leading resource management tools.

List of resource management best practices

Inexperienced managers can leverage the insights of their peers to confidently navigate their paths and swiftly achieve success in managing project resources. Best practices also assist.

Let’s explore them right away.

✔️ Clear goals and objectives

Any business initiative begins with clear goals and objectives. This groundwork allows managers to efficiently draft a resource management plan and allocate assets optimally.

By aligning future resources with these established goals, your team can prioritize project activities more effectively.

During this initial phase, it’s also crucial to explore and select the most effective resource allocation methods to drive your asset management efforts toward success.

✔️ Team capacity

Another resource management best practice is to proactively evaluate the full range of tasks your team undertakes. Communication, information retrieval, adjusting to shifting priorities, and navigating between different apps are common time sinks for employees. Sometimes, they may even take on duties outside their designated roles. Therefore, it is crucial for managers to carefully plan resource allocation, taking into account their team’s capabilities, particularly when overseeing multiple projects.

✔️ Type of a resource calendar

Before you start planning and allocating resources, it’s crucial to determine the structure of your resource calendar. It will help you manage the project assets effectively.

You have the option to use traditional spreadsheets or modern online project management tools. To ensure the chosen software meets the needs and preferences of each team member, it’s important to carefully select a tool that offers the necessary features.

✔️ Appropriate resource management tool

The next practice in the set of resource management best practices involves implementing a robust technological solution. It allows businesses to centralize resource data, track utilization, and automate routine tasks like scheduling and allocation, significantly reducing manual errors and boosting overall productivity.

Managers all over the world recognize the benefits of an online Gantt chart for efficient resource scheduling and allocation. Among the many Gantt chart-based tools, GanttPRO stands out as highly versatile and comprehensive software.

This robust resource management software assists when you want to visualize tasks, improve work planning, deadline control, progress tracking, and team collaboration.

✔️ Established budget

Budget management is essential for project teams to evaluate costs and determine the feasibility of initiatives. By identifying and avoiding financially unviable activities, teams can ensure an efficient return on investment. Keeping a comprehensive list of all project expenses is therefore crucial.

With GanttPRO, you can efficiently manage your project finances by scheduling and tracking expenses in real time. This helps maintain budget adherence and financial transparency throughout the project lifecycle.

✔️ Task organization

Before diving into the nuances of resource management, start by segmenting your project into manageable tasks. Create subtasks and map out your activities on a streamlined timeline using a work breakdown structure (WBS) for seamless organization.

Also, consider GanttPRO as an efficient WBS tool. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can easily set up task dependencies and place milestones, enhancing your project planning on a GanttPRO timeline.

✔️ Resource allocation

Now you need to gather all the details about the resources you want to include in your project. Count all materials, vehicles, facilities, and so on. Then allocate resources.

GanttPRO allows you to seamlessly manage a variety of resources. This tool enables the assignment of specific employees or resources to designated project tasks, where you can outline precise timeframes for each role.

In just a few clicks, you can bring team members on board, establish their roles, set individual costs, and tailor their calendars. GanttPRO also accommodates virtual resources, from personnel and vehicles to hardware, streamlining your project management to a mere matter of clicks.

✔️ Time control

Another important resource management best practice is time monitoring.

This monitoring may become challenging when it involves an arduous process or consumes too much time. But with a reliable online tool, this process becomes seamless.

✔️ Workload balance

Maintaining a balanced workload is crucial for the success of any project. When employees juggle multiple projects at once, stress and demotivation can arise, potentially leading to decreased productivity and missed deadlines. It’s essential to conduct a thorough workload analysis and organize resources effectively to allow for advanced scheduling and management.

GanttPRO streamlines task tracking and enables timely adjustments in resource allocation, preventing both underutilization and overloading. This centralized approach to monitoring and balancing workloads ensures that your team’s workload is calculated accurately and efficiently within seconds.

✔️ Resource constraints

Resource constraints include limitations on the availability, utilization, and allocation of essential assets needed to execute a project. These constraints often arise from various factors such as scarce resources, budget limits, competing projects, and the skill levels of the involved personnel. Such limitations can demotivate the team and negatively impact productivity. To mitigate these effects, project managers must engage in comprehensive planning, prioritization, and optimization of resources.

These were just 10 resource management best practices for your consideration. However, we still have others. You can explore them by reading the full version of this article here: https://blog.ganttpro.com/en/resource-management-best-practices/.