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.
Implementing effective resource planning management requires a combination of putting the right tools in place and managing change with the teams concerned. One cannot work without the other. Here are the steps you need to take to put resource planning management at the heart 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. Optimizing workloads
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. Search for profiles 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.
Step 2
Create profile database
By taking as much data as possible into account when managing resource planning, you integrate more information to help you 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. Employees should be able to indicate the type of project on which they would like to be positioned (for example: data science, marketing, aeronautics, etc.).
Although it's not always possible to exploit this data in a context of capacity tension, 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 dates
By its very nature, a schedule is in constant motion. Employees enter and leave the company. You need to integrate the dates of entry and exit into the database, so that the capacity calculation takes them into account. Otherwise, you run the risk of staffing a profile that has already left the company.
f. Absences / part-time work
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
Select angle of view and planning unit
Now that the database is ready, it's time to assign the load to the various profiles. To do this correctly, you need to set up the views you want. Here are the various options:
a. With dates, in hours
If projects are short, i.e. lasting between a few hours and a few days, you should opt for hourly planning and a day-by-day view. In this case, it's likely to be important to know the precise dates of assignments, or even the defined times of day. In this case, calendar scheduling is the best option. Add a day view of resource planning (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 employee and 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 project completion margin (which takes into account what has already been done and what remains to be done).
- Monitor project planning and identify at an early stage those projects that are going off-budget
The assignment by employee must be transcribed into a project view: for each project, you need to know the forecast time to be spent by employee and, if necessary, by task.
Step 4
Supporting change and putting resource planning at the heart of the reactor
Choosing a tool from resource planning or creating your own tool to manage resource planning is the first step towards facilitating the implementation of the process. But to guarantee success, it is essential to accompany the implementation of the resource planning tool with a transformation process that engages the various managers and secures their support.
a. Explain the impacts of good management of resource planning
The first step is to explain the reasons for managing resource planning better. By detailing the following reasons, the benefits perceived by management and managers should be enough to find alignment:
i. Increase business profitability
- Increased time spent on billable projects
- Optimization of employee time
- Visibility of overloaded and underloaded subjects
ii. Improved employee satisfaction
- Better visibility of your schedule
- Easily position yourself on a project and express your project preferences
iii. Time savings
- Task automation ( resource planning requirements, profile searches, workflows and impact calculations)
- Centralization of project, resource planning and time spent data
iv. Improved customer satisfaction
- Better anticipation for faster project start-up
- Choice of profiles better suited to customer needs
v. Selling advantages
- Wider choice of profiles to better meet customer needs
- Speed in producing a quality profile offer to meet an assignment
b. Set up regular forums
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 highly sought-after profiles. Companies that effectively manage resource planning meet regularly, often once a week, to take stock of :
- Upcoming projects and profiles for these projects
- Projects that are going off-budget and require special monitoring
- Employees who are underloaded or about to end a contract and need to be repositioned
This type of body generally brings together the head of operations and his or her key managers, and puts resource planning at the heart of operations.
c. Empower managers to ensure regular updates
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, you can automate: profile searches, positioning on customer needs, and production schedules.
To find out more about the Stafiz platform, visit the product page.