9 common mistakes when managing resource planning
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 external profiles
When you're looking for a profile to meet a customer requirement, the search is most likely carried out in your candidate database and among your internal profiles. But it's likely that you've 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 enable you to land the project by offering your customer a better profile than your competitor. Not taking external and subcontractor profiles into account in your research is a mistake that can cost you dearly!
💡 How to avoid it: it's essential to integrate your pool of subcontractors and freelancers into your profile databases. Your resource planning management tool can give you the capacity to save hundreds of external profiles. It can notify them when a requirement matches their profile. Stafiz, for example, enables externs to indicate when they are available or, conversely, when they are unavailable. This multiplies their chances of appearing at the top of searches when they are relevant.
Stafiz helps you to manage your resource planning and to better control the workload of your employees and subcontractors. Get a more complete overview of the different profiles, their experience, skills and availability, so you can assign them to missions that suit them.
3. Not integrating employee preferences
The art of creating an effective resource planning involves not only making the best casting choices to satisfy the customer, but also making choices that enable the employee to grow and feel his or her career progress. To implement this approach, it is imperative to integrate employee preferences into the resource planning tool. By "preferences", we mean the type of projects on which employees wish to work (e.g. "an energy project", "financial due diligence", etc.) or, conversely, projects on which employees do not wish to be staffed ("an assignment for an arms manufacturer", for example).
Knowing your employees' preferences is the best way to bring about real career progression and ensure their satisfaction and retention. Although it's not always possible to take them into account, not knowing employee preferences is still a major mistake.
💡 How to avoid it: make sure the resource planning tool you choose allows employees to save their preferences and update them easily. Also make sure that the tool's algorithms take proportionate account of this data.
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 resource planning on Excel
It's a classic in the consulting business: using increasingly complex Excel spreadsheets to manage resource planning. Unfortunately, the best spreadsheets have one major drawback: as the number of employees increases, they are no longer able to manage resource planning efficiently. Formulas become too complex, files too large, and readability loses performance. What's more, Excel does not provide real-time capacity updates 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.
6. Do not update resource planning regularly
In essence, resource planning is in constant motion. When well optimized, resource planning is regularly modified to ensure that no profile is overloaded or, conversely, underloaded. Those in charge of resource planning must constantly keep an overview of the workload, and make arbitrages to reorganize it in order to position skills on the right projects according to the situation and customer expectations.
Without a tool at resource planning enabling managers to readjust the provisional on a regular basis, capacity and employee workload management cannot provide an accurate view, and arbitrages will have no impact on the profitability of the business.
💡 How to avoid it: the resource planning tool needs to offer secure access to managers to give them the right level of visibility and the means to update data. The rights management of the resource planning tool must make it possible to limit the view to a project perimeter, or to a team. The possibility of modifying resource planning must be limited to the relevant managers, to enable updating without the risk of distorting the data of other managers.
7. Do not use data from resource planning for financial forecasting.
resource planning is an essential part of the financial forecast. Unfortunately, it is all too common to make the mistake of disconnecting the load forecast from the financial forecast. On the one hand, the forecast workload is regularly updated, while on the other, the remaining work to be done on the project is entered manually to calculate the forecast margin for the project.
The job is done twice! A useless waste of time for the project manager. After all, knowledge of the workload forecast should make it possible to calculate the progress of the project, and more precisely the progress of sales and margins over the coming months. Failure to use this data to calculate the percentage of cost progress is an all-too-frequent error.
💡 How to avoid it: here again, your resource planning tool must know how to calculate sales and margins with the right methodology. Not all tools are capable of correctly calculating the data needed to compute the financial forecast. But when the tool does, visibility on the forecast is given in real time, and reactivity to optimize margins enables you to rapidly increase the profitability of your business.
8. Do not compare actual with 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 resource planning tool must be able to analyze, over a given period (with a start and end date), the number of days completed compared with the number of days planned. The analysis must be simple enough to identify deviations by person, by project and by team.
9. Not making sufficient use of resource planning to drive your company forward.
Good management of resource planning is a means of rapidly moving a company towards excellence. If this process is not sufficiently exploited to optimize performance, the whole business suffers. Good resource planning work improves profitability, employee satisfaction and retention, project quality, customer satisfaction and 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 resource planning tool means you can benefit from the support of business experts who can explain how to set up the right processes and enable you to rapidly improve project profitability and employee satisfaction.
Stafiz helps you gain visibility and better manage your resource planning and project progress thanks to real-time data. The software takes into account costs and financial KPIs. Stafiz is a SaaS solution for resource planning, project management and business intelligence. So budgets and margins are always respected, and you make better decisions for your business.
To find out more about the Stafiz platform, request a demo.
