Resource Planning for Multiple Project Teams
Managing multiple projects across various teams is extremely challenging. Success requires personnel management skills, a capable team, and the right tools to simultaneously oversee an assortment of complex jobs. Resource planning or resource scheduling is an essential process used in highly productive organizations to achieve optimal outcomes. As your business grows, you will have to develop an efficient strategy to allocate resources to save time and budget while maximizing results.
This post will define resource planning at a high level, differentiate the practice from project management, and cover essential team management skills and techniques needed to handle multiple tasks at once.
What is Resource Planning?
Resource planning is the systematic allocation of an organization's time and personnel. A practical resource management strategy includes maintaining stability across multiple projects, tasks, teams while optimizing time and budgeting. The goal of a resource planner is to maximize the potential of all available resources while eliminating waste.
While the type of business will determine the specific resources that need to be managed, most resource planning systems consist of three steps:
- Preparing and analyzing an organization's available resources.
- Evaluating each resource to determine maximum availability and potential.
- Allocating each team member, project manager, budget, or other resources ensures each project is done on time and profitable.
An effective resource manager utilizes experience, personnel evaluation skills, and technology. Assessing the availability of resources, how well team members work together, and which teams are the best fit for each project requires experience with the team members and evaluating the organization's specific resources. Determining output requires the proper technology to assess KPIs. The final step combines interpersonal skills, experience, and management technology.
Team Management Strategies
Teams are an essential resource that must be appropriately utilized to ensure projects are completed with the least amount of waste possible. While technology plays a significant part in resource planning, personal relationships, hiring the right people and understanding each team member's strengths and weaknesses are essential to managing multiple projects at once.
Learn to Delegate
Delegation starts on the hiring level. If your team is inadequate, you don't have options to allocate resources. Learning to delegate requires finding the right people, giving them the proper resources to be successful, and putting them in the best possible situation to be successful.
Manage Time Efficiently
Time is one of the most complicated resources to manage. Minimizing time is a combination of having a sufficient team and providing them with the resources they need. A successful resource manager also needs to know when to pivot or start a project over.
Offer Quality Feedback
Working together with project managers ensures their team can deliver. A resource planner also must give managers quality feedback to keep the team motivated and on the right track.
Essential Team Management Techniques for Multiple Projects
Overseeing multiple projects can quickly become overwhelming. Utilizing team management strategies and technology is the only way to allocate resources and ensure projects are completed on time and under budget.
Projects can be Simple or Scrum
Understanding project managers and team members are essential to providing them with the proper resources to succeed. An efficient resource management strategy allows teams to work within a straightforward or scrum workflow.
Need Consolidated View of All Projects
Finding the right software is essential to gain the outside perspective needed to manage multiple projects. A successful resource planning system requires project managers and team members to buy into tools that record progress, tasks, budget, and deadlines.
Make Changes Seamlessly
Resource management software can also be used to make seamless changes. Pivoting requires an effective bilateral communication platform that all team members utilize. The issue must be flagged, executed, and marked as resolved when a change occurs to keep the project on schedule.
Complex Resource Planning and Team Management
Supervising project managers, diverse teams, and allocating all necessary resources is complex on a single project. When scaling your organization, you will need to increase production with additional projects making day-to-day operations exponentially more complicated. An effective resource management strategy is essential to keeping employees happy, delivering projects on time, and reducing waste.
