9 common mistakes in money management resource planning

August 29, 2023

The resource planning team is a key process in a service company. It not only improves employee performance and retention, but also improves the performance of the company as a whole. The management of resource planning is regularly put aside whereas a simple work on this process allows to generate a fast and important ROI. Stafiz is a resource planning software that simplifies and automates resource planning and improves the performance of projects and employees. Based on our experience with hundreds of customers, we have compiled the 10 most common mistakes and explain how to avoid them.

1. Lack of a complete view of absences

One of the most common errors is the incomplete information that is used to manage the resource planning. IIt often happens that the management of absences is done in a dedicated software, a payroll software or an HRIS. Absence data, whether it be leave, stoppages or part-time work, remains blocked in this software. They do not go back into the staffing system in real time, even though this information is crucial to provide a real view of employees' work capacity.

💡 How to avoid it: ither your resource planning tool allows you to manage absences as well, in which case the information can be easily sent to payroll, while ensuring a native connection with resource planning management. Or an API connector exists between your leave management solution and your resource planning solution. In any case, you must upload the absence information to correctly perform the resource planning.

2. Missing out on external profiles

When you are looking for a profile to meet a customer need, the search is likely carried out in your candidate base and among your internal profiles. But it is likely that you have already worked with a large number of freelancers or external profiles belonging to your subcontractors. These are all skill profiles that could perfectly meet a customer need, and allow you to win the project by offering a better profile to your customer than your competitor. Not taking into account external and subcontractor profiles in research is therefore a mistake that can be costly!

💡 How to avoid it : it is essential to integrate your pool of subcontractors and freelancers into your profile databases. Your management tool resource planning can give you the ability to save hundreds of external profiles. It can allow you to notify them when a need matches their profile. Stafiz, for example, gives external staff the possibility of indicating when they are available or conversely unavailable. They thus increase their chance of moving to the top of the list in searches when they are relevant.

 

Stafiz supports you in the management of your resource planning and helps you better manage the workload of your employees and subcontractors. Benefit from more complete visibility on the different profiles, their experience, skills and availability in order to assign them to missions that suit them.

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3. Not integrating employee preferences

The art of making a resource planning Effective means making the best casting to satisfy the client but also making choices that allow the employee to grow and feel their career progress. To implement this approach, it is imperative to integrate employee preferences into the management tool. resource planning . By "preferences", we must understand the typology of projects on which the collaborators wish to work (for example "an energy project", a "financial due diligence", etc.) or conversely the projects on which the collaborators do not want not be staffed (“a mission for an arms manufacturer” for example).

Knowing employees' preferences is the best way to bring real progression to employees' careers and ensure their satisfaction and retention. Although it is not systematically possible to take them into account, not knowing the preferences of employees remains an important mistake.

💡 How to avoid it : make sure the tool resource planning you choose allows employees to save their preferences and easily update them. Also make sure that the tool's algorithms take this data into account proportionally.

resource planning – Profile search

4. Do not try to optimize the TACE (staff activity rate)

A good management of resource planning rhymes with an improvement of the rate of activity excluded. If you are unfamiliar with this indicator, you should definitely take an interest in it. A service company must have excellent visibility on its utilization rate or the rate of activity excluded. The staff activity rate measures the time spent on projects that generate revenue. It allows you to compare the time available to an employee with the time that contributes to generating revenue for the company.

This key indicator makes it possible to monitor a profitability objective, since at the same time, the employees' salary costs remain fixed. The staff activity rateobjective varies according to the role and the seniority of the profiles: more senior employees will generally have a lower staff activity rate than junior profiles since a larger part of their time is devoted to subjects that do not directly generate sales (management, sales, etc.)

💡 How to avoid it: if you're not looking to optimize your staff activity rate, it's time to set up the calculations so that your resource planning gives you full visibility on this indicator. Of course you also need your solution to allow you to compare these forecasted TACEs with the realized staff activity rates. Ideally, the resource planning tool calculates the staff activity rate by profile type, by team and by individual to provide the right level of reading.

5. Manage the resource planning on Excel

It's a great classic in consulting activities: using ever more complex Excel to manage the resource planning . Unfortunately, the best spreadsheets have a major flaw: when the number of employees increases, they no longer make it possible to effectively manage the resource planning . Formulas become too complex, files too large, and readability loses performance. Furthermore, Excel does not update capacities in real time when an employee takes leave, for example.

💡 How to avoid it: get rid of your staffing Excel as soon as possible and opt for a staffing tool. As soon as you reach a dozen employees, the staffing tool allows you to gain in efficiency and visibility and brings you a quick ROI.

 

How to choose the right resource planning tool? What criteria should you consider when looking to purchase the right resource planning tool for your business? Read this article to find out what is most important when choosing your resource management solution.

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6. Not updating the resource planning regularly

In essence, the resource planning is in constant movement. When well optimized, the resource planning of employees is regularly modified to ensure that no profile is overloaded or, conversely, underloaded. Those responsible for resource planning must constantly keep an overall view of the workload and carry out arbitrations to reorganize it in order to position the skills on the right projects according to the situation and customer expectations.

Without a tool resource planning allowing managers to readjust the provision regularly, the management of capacities and the workload of employees cannot provide a precise view, and the arbitrations will not have an impact on the profitability of the activity.

💡 How to avoid it : the tool must resource planning provides secure access to managers to give them the right level of visibility and the means to update data. Rights management of the tool resource planning must make it possible to limit the view to a project scope, or to a team. The possibility of modifying the resource planning must be limited to the relevant managers to allow updating without risking distorting the data of other managers

 

7. Do not exploit the data of the resource planning for financial forecasting

THE resource planning is an essential piece of financial forecasting. The error of uncorrelated the load forecast with the financial forecast is unfortunately too common. Regularly, the forecast load on the projects is updated on one side, while at the same time the remaining work to be done on the project is entered manually to calculate the forecast margin of the project.

The job is done twice! Unnecessary waste of time for the project manager. Because knowledge of the load forecast should make it possible to calculate the progress of the project, and more precisely the progress of turnover and margins in the months to come. Not using this data to calculate the percentage of completion of costs is a mistake that is too often repeated.

💡 How to avoid it : here again, your tool resource planning must know how to calculate turnover and margins with the right methodology. Not all tools are capable of correctly calculating the data to calculate the financial forecast. But when the tool allows it, visibility on the forecast is given in real time, and the responsiveness to optimize margins makes it possible to quickly increase the profitability of the activity.

8. Do not compare the achieved with the resource planning for analysis purposes

The resource planning tools allows you to plan resources, optimize workloads and ensure the quality of projects by positioning the most relevant expertise on each project. But it is necessary to go further in the analysis. Without a comparison of the differences between what was achieved and what was resource planning, it is impossible to understand the reasons for a financial gap between what was planned and what was achieved. There is no point in doing a financial analysis at the end of the period without being able to make this comparison, to understand where the variance comes from, in number of days and in value.

💡 How to avoid it : the tool must resource planning allows you to analyze over a given period (with a start date and an end date), the number of days completed in relation to the number of days planned. The analysis should be simple enough to identify gaps by person, by project and by team.

9. Not using the device enough resource planning to advance your society

Good management of resource planning is a way to quickly advance a society towards excellence. Not exploiting this process sufficiently to optimize performance is damaging to the entire activity. A good job of resource planning makes it possible to improve profitability, improve employee satisfaction and retention, improve project quality, improve customer satisfaction and improve project margins. The ROI offered by good management of resource planning is therefore immense and the mistake of missing out on these improvements can cost the company dearly.

💡 How to avoid it : setting up a monitoring tool resource planning allows you to benefit from support from industry experts who can explain how to implement the right processes and enable you to quickly improve project profitability and employee satisfaction.



Stafiz helps you gain visibility and better manage your resource planning and your project progress thanks to real-time data. The software takes into account costs and financial KPIs. Stafiz is a SaaS management resource planning , project management and Business Intelligence. So budgets and margins are always respected and you make better decisions for your business.

To learn more about the Stafiz platform, request a demo.

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