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CONTENTS
Quick access: All steps
- Define the approach and objective of your resource planning
- Creating your profile database
- Create skills repository and update profiles
- Update employee preferences
- Assigning profiles to projects
- Setting up KPIs
- Optimize resource planning
- Supporting change
- Define periodic objectives and start monitoring
- Choose your tool resource planning
Step 1
Define the approach and objective of your resource planning
Depending on the activity, resource planning may have different objectives
- First of all, there's resource planning customer needs. In other words, finding the right profile(s) to meet a need expressed by a customer.
- Secondly, the work of load optimization. To make sure that the employees are correctly assigned, that there is no overload or surcharge.
- Finally, there's the more commercial approach, which consists of anticipating the end of employee assignments and ensuring that they are repositioned on projects to avoid inter-contracting.
These different objectives often go hand in hand. But they can have a different degree of importance depending on your business strategy. It's up to you to decide which objectives your resource planning process should focus on.
Step 2
Create profile database
Take into account internal and external profiles
If your resource planning is primarily designed to optimize staff workloads, the resource planning process will only need to track internal employees. But if you want to position external profiles to meet customer needs, and if you also work regularly with freelancers and subcontractors, the database taken into account when working on your resource planning needs to be broader.
The 3 types of profile to be taken into account are as follows:
- In-house staff
This in-house profile database is essential to the success of your resource planning objectives. All profiles must be taken into account, and it must be possible to update profiles with skills and preferences (clarified in the next section).
- External profiles (subcontractors) and candidates
Knowing how to respond to all customer demands thanks to a database of profiles that will identify skills above and beyond those of internal employees can create a real competitive advantage for a service company. The chances of meeting customer requirements with the right level of skills must be maximized.
That is why it is necessary to also include the profiles of subcontractors you have already worked with, and of candidates (profile you have identified and registered) so that you can contact them if necessary.
Step 3
Create skills repository and update profiles
Which skills should be assigned to which profiles?
- Defining the skills repository
We need to clarify the list of skills that can be assigned to different profiles. This requires coordination between sales teams and management. They know exactly what customers want. Human resources teams may already be monitoring these skills aspects. Alignment within your company as regards the skills repository to be followed is necessary, as there is an offer issue vis-à-vis the customer and a career follow-up issue from the HR point of view.
- Matching skills to profiles
The skills must then be added to each profile with an indication of the mastery of each of them. The skill level is an interesting addition to facilitate the choice when several profiles have the same skill requested by a client. It is important that this update is done massively if it is to be done by the same person. Otherwise, each employee must be given the opportunity to update his or her own skills, before the manager checks them.
- Post-mission skills added
As employees complete projects, they accumulate new skills or develop existing ones. To keep the skills base up to date, you need to be able to update it after each project.
Step 4
Update employee preferences
Select profiles according to customer criteria and integrate preferences
Selecting profiles according to customer criteria is imperative. Integrating employee preferences into the selection criteria is a real asset for employees. It's an approach that fosters career progression and the development of profiles' skills. It's the kind of process that promotes employee satisfaction and retention.
- First, select the type of preferences that can be updated
In order to remain pragmatic, we need to define which types of preferences can be updated by employees. Indeed, they need to be able to be used in the resource planning choices, otherwise this approach will end up creating more frustration on the employee side than satisfaction. It is also important that these preferences correspond to the criteria used in the resource planning requests, so that matching can take place.
- The next step is to carry out a preference update campaign.
Ideally, a communication to launch a campaign over a limited period ensures that all employees update their preferences. You need to make sure that you have an easy way of tracking who hasn't updated their preferences, so that you can follow up with them.
Step 5
Assigning profiles to projects
Fill in the resource planning by allocating the forecast load to date on the projects.
- Customer projects
We need to confirm, at day, week or month level, the time planned to be spent in the future on each customer project. Project managers are the people who will have the best visibility to indicate what remains to be done by each employee, and over what period this workload should be planned.
- In-house projects
It is also necessary to take into account the workload associated with internal projects. This ranges from management time to the various internal projects to which employees contribute. Planning is often based on a number of hours or a portion of a day over a period of time. For example, half a day a week devoted to management.
This update takes into account the associated load, and thus reduces the capacity of collaborators to avoid overloading them.
- Absences and part-time work
Finally, it's important to position all planned absences, and in the case of part-time employees, to indicate the dates on which they can't work. If, for example, an employee works four-fifths time, and is absent every Friday, it is essential that his or her capacity reflects this.
Step 6
Setting up KPIs
What are the key indicators to track?
At this stage, you have a consolidated view of the load, as well as detailed information by profile (and potentially by team). Here are the key indicators you need to track:
- Occupancy rate : this rate calculates the occupancy percentage of a resource by integrating all activities and projects (customers, interns, vacations included, etc.).
Objective : see the employee's overall occupation and check whether he or she has the capacity to be staffed on customer or internal projects.
- TACE (staff activity rate): the percentage of time spent on billable projects compared to the time available.
Objective : to ensure that employees spend enough time on sales-generating projects to preserve margins.
- Forecasted sales vs. valued production: thanks to forecasted workload, it is possible to know how sales will progress in future periods. For a fixed-price project, the progress of the project will determine the sales that will be recognized in future periods. For a fixed-price project, the progress of the project will determine the sales to be recognized in future periods. You need to be able to calculate and differentiate between them.
How to set up an effective resource planning management process?
Discover all the essential steps in our guide
Steps 7 & 8
Optimize resource planning and support change
Identifying problems
The global view you've created now enables you toidentify issuesand answer the following questions:
- Who's over-staffed?
- Who's under-staffed?
- Which teams have low projected staff activity rates?
- Is the current resource planning system capable of meeting sales targets?
The role of the operations manager is to resolve each of these points by making the necessary trade-offs and adjusting allocations so that the indicators are at the right level.
Coordinating change
Implementing a high-performance resource planning that improves performance means coordinating change so that data is regularly updated. This update frequency is imperative to ensure that the data you rely on to make decisions is reliable and relevant.
Project managers need to be trained and made accountable, so that they regularly update their project workload forecasts. Ideally, they should review their project portfolio on a monthly basis. It is also necessary to set up a regular resource planning meeting to facilitate arbitration.
Depending on the needs of the various teams and the customer's challenges, a decision taken collectively by a manager is the best way to improve performance.
Steps 9 & 10
Define periodic objectives and start monitoring, and choose your monitoring tool resource planning
Indicator analysis
Now that everything is in place, it's time to define the objectives to be achieved, on which resource planning has a direct impact. The KPIs identified above should be reviewed by management, and monthly, quarterly and annual targets set. The employee approach also makes it possible to consolidate at the level of groups of people (teams, business units, roles, etc.).
These indicators therefore need to be analyzed from different angles, and targets set at each level to boost performance.
Choose a tool resource planning
You have the choice of working your resource planning on spreadsheets and designing templates, or choosing a dedicated resource planning tool. As you can imagine, we recommend the second option. Spreadsheets create the following problems:
- Updates not made in real time
- Complexity of working with several people on a file
- Risk of model obsolescence or inability to maintain a model
- Lack of intelligence and data vision
- Lack of visuals
Will you be opting for a tool from resource planning ?
With Stafiz, you can automate: profile searches, positioning on customer needs, and production schedules.
To find out more about the Stafiz platform, visit the product page.