Find out how the Stafiz solution can help you manage your resource planning
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Step 1
Define the main goals of resource management.
Implement effective management of resource planning requires combining the implementation of the right tools and managing change with the teams concerned. One cannot function without the other. Here are the steps to follow to set up management of the resource planning which will be the heart of the reactor of your growth.
The objectives to be achieved through good management of resource planning may vary according to the activity and priorities of each company. Among the main objectives listed below, it's important to take a step back and define which ones have priority.
Although they are all important, the approach may vary depending on the order of priority.
a. Give visibility to employees
As soon as it is set up, staffng management provides visibility on team planning. Managing resource planning means keeping track of workload planning, as well as project and task assignments. Staff often lack visibility of their schedule at a few weeks' notice.
They know their schedule in the short term, but lack visibility beyond that. By giving them better visibility, you increase employee satisfaction, and make them feel more comfortable, as they can better project and anticipate the implications of this schedule from both a professional and personal point of view.
b. Facilitate load balancing to improve efficiency, and get projects to start faster
Businesses that operate in project mode are well aware of bottleneck problems.
The very first bottleneck in a project is the lack of team capacity.
By managing resource planning with the right tools, capacities improve dramatically and bottlenecks are reduced. Projects get off the ground more quickly because the organization is better oiled, and visibility of everyone's capabilities is accentuated.
c. Optimize workload
In all project teams, the subjects of overloading and underloading penalize performance.
Overloaded employees can't deliver their work as well and risk burn-out, while underloaded employees represent a poor use of company resources and risk demotivation.
Optimizing workloads to distribute them more evenly, and ensuring that everyone in the team is working to his or her full potential, boosts performance and employee satisfaction.
d. Conduct profile searches to meet needs
resource planning can also be more focused on the process of searching for profiles according to criteria. Without a tool, it's difficult to keep track of requests, to enable a "match" between the need and the profiles that meet it. Whatever your objectives, make sure that management has set the right priorities, so that you can set the right standards when implementing your resource planning management system.
2nd step
Create the profile database
By taking into account as much data as possible to manage the resource planning , you integrate more information that allows you to make the right decisions. Ideally, you create your profile database with the following data:
a. Names
This is a prerequisite for carrying out searches and providing visibility on assignments.
In the medium term, project workload planning can be applied to roles rather than names. But it is essential to staff projects and tasks to specific people in the short term.
b. Roles & teams
To make it easier to find profiles in the database, we need to assign them "tags" to facilitate the search.
Group them according to role (developer, consultant, manager, etc.) or rank (junior, senior, etc.). If teams are divided into divisions or business units, you also need to confirm to which team each profile belongs.
c. SKILLS
When you're managing a resource planning for teams of more than thirty people, you need to take account of skills to better meet customer needs.
First of all, you need to establish a skills repository to update your profiles in a consistent way. This repository needs to be the same for your employees, subcontractors and candidates, so that searches for your resource planning are as relevant as possible.
d. Preferences
By encouraging your employees to indicate their preferences from a defined set of preferences, you make it possible to take into account this criterion, which will have an impact on the satisfaction of your teams. For example, employees should be able to indicate the type of project on which they would like to be positioned (e.g. data science, marketing, aeronautics, etc.).
Although it's not always possible to exploit this data in a context of capacity pressures, if you respond favorably in even 30% of cases, it will already make a huge difference to your employer brand and employee satisfaction.
e. Arrival and departure date
By nature, a schedule is in constant motion. Some employees return, others leave the company. It is necessary to integrate the entry and exit dates into the base, so that the capacity calculation takes them into account. Otherwise you risk staffing a profile that has already left the company.
f. Absences / part-time
For a capacity schedule to be useful, it is imperative to enter the periods during which your profiles are unavailable: vacations, stoppages and part-time periods.
Without this data, resource planning management loses performance because crucial information is unavailable. Either your resource planning tool is connected via API to your HR absence management tool, or you import absence data into your resource planning tool on a regular basis (weekly, for example).
Step 3
Choose viewing angle and planning unit
Now that the database is ready, you must assign the load to the different profiles. To do it correctly, you need to establish the views that suit you. Here are the different options:
a. With dates, in hours
If the projects are short, that is to say they last between a few hours and a few days, you must choose hourly planning and a day-by-day view. In this case, it is probably important to know the precise dates of assignments, or even the hours defined in a day. Planning in calendar format is then the best option. Add a view of resource planning with the days (take the one with the color bars)
b. Weekly or monthly
If the majority of projects last more than 5 days, it is preferable to monitor the weekly workload. In other words, assign a number of days in a given week to a project. For example: allocate 34 Bob Kennedy days in a week, 3.5 days on project XYZ Depending on the number of days allocated to each project, you should be able to track the remaining availability.
For projects lasting several months, the same approach should be taken at month granularity. Ideally, you choose the finest granularity that suits you, and consolidation allows you to see it at other time horizons. Add a view of resource planning in % load ( blue and red ) with weeks in columns
c. By collaborator and by project
Your resource planning management system must enable you to manage your employees' workloads. This means you need to have global, accessible visibility to determine at a glance whether employees are under or overloaded. But resource planning management must also enable you to improve operational performance in a number of ways:
- Know what remains to be done and the associated costs to calculate a margin for project completion (which takes into account what has already been done and what remains to be done)
- Monitor project planning and identify early enough those that are deviating from their budget
The allocation by employee must be transcribed into a view by project: in each project, you need to know what is the forecast time to be spent by employee and, if necessary, by tasks.
Step 4
Support change and place the resource planning at the heart of the reactor
Choose a tool resource planning or create your own tool to manage the resource planning is a first step that facilitates the implementation of the process. But for success to be guaranteed, it is imperative to support the implementation of the tool resource planning through a transformation which must engage the various managers and make it possible to obtain their support.
a. Explain the impacts of good management of resource planning
The first step is to explain the reasons for better managing the resource planning . By detailing the following reasons, the benefits perceived by management and managers should be enough to find alignment:
i. Increased profitability of the activity
- Increased time spent on billable projects
- Optimization of time spent by employees
- Visibility on subjects overloaded or underloaded
ii. Better employee satisfaction
- Better visibility on your schedule
- Ease of positioning yourself on a project and expressing your project preferences
iii. Time savings
- Task automation (needs for resource planning , profile searches, workflows and impact calculations
- Centralization of project data, resource planning and time spent
iv. Better customer satisfaction
- Better anticipation allowing projects to start more quickly
- Choice of profiles better suited to customer needs
v. Sales advantages
- Wider choice of profiles to better meet customer needs
- Speed in producing an offer of quality profiles to respond to a mission
b. Set up regular instances
For optimal management of resource planning , you need to be able to make decisions as a group, under the responsibility of management. The same profile is often adapted to different needs. In the final analysis, one person must be able to decide on which project to assign these in-demand profiles. Companies that effectively manage resource planning meet regularly, often once a week, to take stock of :
- The projects that will start and the staffable profiles on them
- Projects that are deviating from the budget and require special monitoring
- Employees who are underworked or about to end a contract and need to be repositioned
This type of body generally brings together the operations manager and their main managers and makes it possible to put the resource planning at the operations center.
c. Give support to those responsible so that updates are carried out regularly
Finally, resource planning must be everyone's business. Every project manager needs to be involved in updating the workloads of the people working on his or her projects.
They have the best visibility for forecasting future workloads. By empowering your teams to ensure that updates are made regularly, you'll benefit from much more relevant, consolidated visibility. Data feedback should not depend on a single person in charge of planning, but should be distributed among all stakeholders.
These managers need to be encouraged to update. It should enable them to improve the performance of their project and the satisfaction of their teams, which in turn can help them achieve their objectives.
With Stafiz, automate: the search for profiles, positioning on customer needs, and production schedules.
To learn more about the Stafiz platform, visit the product page.