If you sell professional services or work in project mode, resource planning is part of your daily routine.
Managing it properly is an important performance issue. For this reason, a resource planning manager is likely to support your project teams in improving the resource distribution.
What is the role of the staffing manager?
The staffing manager, or resource planning manager, is responsible for strategic planning of resource capacity. He or she is in a position to allocate the best profiles to a project's tasks and sub-tasks, so as to meet the 3 key criteria for success:
cost constraints,
time constraints,
quality requirements.
Talent acquisition and management: a major challenge
To carry out their mission successfully, all good resource planning managers need to have sufficient technical and business knowledge to understand project resource requirements.
During the talent sourcing analytical skills are also required for optimal resource planning, notably through analysis of past projects.
This responsibility is aligned with a company's strategic objectives, since this matching of skills and employees in the short and long term leads to greater efficiency.
Resource planning manager and recruiter: what are the differences?
While both play a central role in resource management,staffing managers and recruiters are involved at different levels.
The resource planning manager works on a broader, more strategic scope, in order to plan projects to meet customer needs.
The recruiter has a more operational role, and is responsible for the process of recruitingcandidates to meet identified resource requirements - for for exampleby the resource planning manager.
These two missions are naturally intertwined, which is why it's possible that the resource planning manager's hat is worn by the HR department, the BU director, or even project managers in certain structures.
But the resource planning manager is a profession in its own right, and one that is becoming increasingly important as the size of the company grows.
How does the staffing manager contribute to company growth?
The staffing manager implements best practices in resource planning to improve business efficiency.
The workforce optimization work orchestrated by the staffing manager can be considered as performance management in its own right. Resource planning has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, by guaranteeing :
quality production through a careful selection of skills;
timely delivery thanks to the assignment of sufficiently experienced profiles.
Using the Stafiz tool, you can manage your resource planning with complete short-, medium- and long-term visibility on resource planning!
Stay one step ahead, and plan your projects from the pre-sales stage onwards.
When a job is won, the profiles pre-staffed via the time reserved for jobs are automatically integrated into the schedule.
In the event of failure, the resource planning forecast is deleted, and your staff's availabilities are updated.
Thanks to improved organizational efficiency you'll be able to accept more customer requests, and grow your business.
How can resource planning software make resource planning manager's job easier?
Resource planning manager's techniques for optimizing recruitment processes
Anticipating recruitment needs is a key challenge for resource planning.
A shortage of talent or skills can lead to periods of understaffing, and increase the risk of overload for your employees. A sustainable business needs to ensure a certain degree of continuity. Shortages also mean under-performance in sales: without the right talent, you can't get projects off the ground on time and satisfy your customers.
The resource requirements are more easily identified by the resource planning manager if his tool offers him complete visibility of manpower availability .
He can then decide on the best course of action: training, subcontracting or recruitment.
Stafiz enables you to anticipate these needs by monitoring projects that have been won and those that are about to be won:
Stafiz CRM lets you manage and anticipate opportunities. The Stafiz API connects your CRM.
How do you source talent and keep your talent pool up to date?
Centralizing resource requirements is essential for efficient management of resource planning.
This approach enables you to take stock of your current resource capacity but also to select the profiles and teams to assign to each current or future project.
In particular, Stafiz offers a powerful skills management engine to facilitate your search for profiles to allocate.
Short on time for manual profile entry?
Transfer your employees' CVs and let Stafiz work its magic! OCR technology lets you search and read PDFs directly from the source. Time saving guaranteed!
The data in the pool is then used by the algorithm to search for profiles during the resource planning.
Enter your keywords, select the right usage level, and take advantage of the Smart Matching Stafiz for optimal resource allocation in just a few clicks.
How do you maintain an efficient, balanced load distribution?
Are you managing your load planning with Excel and lacking real-time and forecast visibility?
Do you find it difficult to visualize and anticipate your occupancy rates, overloads or underloads (or even "gaps" in the schedule or periods between contracts)? Do you find it difficult to study utilization rate ?
Stafiz lets you anticipate.
The load load distribution obvious to you? With just a few clicks, you can readjust your workload by adding or subtracting time from one employee and allocating it to another.
This vision enables you to optimize your utilization rate, so as to keep your teams mobilized on profit-generating projects.
To go one step further, with time tracking, you can monitor the actual occupancy of projects.
Staffing managers' methods for engaging teams
Resource planning software is proving to be a real springboard for employee engagement and satisfaction.
Firstly, sharing the same level of information between project stakeholders provides greater transparency concerning the overall progress.
Secondly, a collaborative solution with notification functionalities such as Stafiz helps to empower employees with greater autonomy and flexibility.
But the best way to engage your employees is to make a point of taking their preferences into account!
We know that despite all your good intentions, the reality on the ground can make the task complicated.
To overcome this problem, Stafiz offers employees the opportunity to indicate on their profile their interest in a particular type of mission, sector or skill to be mobilized for a project.
This data inks the information, which is sometimes discussed at annual meetings, and makes it possible to establish a genuine monitoring process and facilitate its application.
If you give your collaborators access to the various projects they have won or are about to win in Stafiz, they can keep up to date on upcoming activity and notify managers of their interest on the needs screen.
Why is Stafiz the best technological assistant for resource planning ?
Designed specifically to meet the resource management and planning needs of professional service companies, Stafiz will simplify your day-to-day management.
Promoting collaboration between HR and project teams
The data collected by the staffingl solution on individual employee performance complements the annual appraisal interviews by implementing a employee follow-up.
This reflects a more objective reality, thanks to the precise data collected throughout the project.
Taking financial imperatives into account in the management of the resource planning
By integrating both resource planning and financial planning data, Stafiz is able to forecast costs and benefits based on resource planning. This means you can adjust your workload to reduce expenses and increase margins!
The scenario builder even offers you different scenarios for optimizing your resource allocation according to your objectives: optimizing margins, occupancy rates...
During the project, this analysis continues with the analysis of time and cost deviations in line with operational and financial performance.
It is then possible to compare actual results with forecasts in real time.
Once the project has been completed, the history is kept so that you can evaluate your production according to the chosen criteria:
workflow ;
phase progress ;
production teams.
This makes it easier to identify the reasons for any delays or bottlenecks. An exercise that will benefit you when planning future projects !
The resource planning manager's mission is one of great responsibility.
Whether operating in a small structure - where this duty falls to an employee with a dual functionor in a large organization where it's more difficult to know every employee and all the technical specifics imputed to customer needs with parsimonya tool resource planning is needed to facilitate the tasks of finding profiles, allocating resources and respecting budgets.