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Resource planning in project management

Use resources efficiently

Use resources efficiently

Resource planning is one of the very central terminologies of enterprise project management and is used to efficiently allocate necessary resources so as to optimize management to ensure the smooth running of the entire project.

Basically, resource planning in project management is about identifying the necessary as well as available resources, planning and assigning the different tasks within a project and the total time that the project will take to complete. The Project Manager coordinates tasks and responsibilities to meet deadlines and ensure the long-term profitability of the project.

In the following article, we provide you with a compact overview of what exactly is behind this and which forms of implementation are target-oriented.

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Resource planning

What is resource planning?

Resource planning refers to the process of planning all physical and non-physical resources required for a project and thus includes human, equipment, material, financial, and time resources. In doing so, it pursues the major goal of displaying all relevant resources as quickly and without errors as possible in order to complete the job as effectively as possible.

The following central questions of project management are clarified:

  • Until when can the job be done?
  • Which team members are assigned to the project and to what extent?
  • How are tasks assigned to different team members?
  • Which machines are needed for production and when? Are all machines and equipment already available?
  • What material resources (raw materials, materials, equipment, software, tools, etc.) are available or need to be purchased/rented?
  • Where does the order take place? Are additional premises required?
  • What is the anticipated contract budget?
  • How to respond to staff shortages in an emergency?

All these are typical questions from the everyday business life of many corporations, medium-sized companies, startups or even self-employed entrepreneurs, which should be answered as concretely as possible sooner or later for project planning. In addition, the key aspects of good resource planning are planning reliability, avoidance of overload and good documentation.

This is why resource planning is so important in project management

Well-organized and transparent resource planning makes it possible to track all relevant steps of a project in a very detailled way. As soon as problems occur at a certain point in the process, a solution can be sought immediately. Conversely, without professional resource planning, if certain project components are not recorded, then confusion, project delays, or cost increases quickly result.

Another elementary aspect is the coordination of the different employees and departments among each other as well as time management.

The reason for this is that resource planning makes it possible to track exactly when which tasks are to be performed by whom and with which devices. In dynamic resource management systems, work can be carried out hand in hand without any time delay, as the planning tables in the system constantly adjust to the current status for all parties involved.

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When does your company need project management resource planning software?

Many responsible persons in companies ask themselves this question. However, the answer to this question cannot be determined by a specific number of employees. Rather, it is the everyday framework conditions in project management on which you should base your decision.

If at least one of the following is accomplished, you should definitely explore a resource planning system more closely:

  • Multiple team members work in parallel on the same projects.
  • Different customer orders are processed at the same time.
  • Employees work at different locations.
  • Customer orders pass through various phases that build on each other.
  • The projects cover periods of several months or weeks, which can hardly be kept track of. Or else: in short periods of time, the work process passes through many different phases.
  • In the customer projects there are different responsibilities according to tasks.

Mastering challenges

At some point, you will encounter challenges here that make it necessary to adequately record the resources. And then you will ask yourself: does it need a resource planning tool for this? Yes, there is a whole range of already well-known office products for visualization and planning nowadays, but this has many pitfalls. Spreadsheet and calculation tools, such as Excel, are not designed to map project management processes.

Calendar-based tools may be able to capture the appointments well, but then have their weaknesses in responsibilities and depositing further material resources.

At this point, it is worth thinking about professional resource planning through a specialized tool. Here, it is possible to map significantly more transparency, to store a schedule that is always synchronized and to calculate deadlines on the basis of personnel and material capacities. All tasks can also be stored centralized in the tool, and if delays occur, the company can react to them quickly.

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The advantages of resource planning in
project management at a glance

Finally, we would like to summarize the advantages of professional resource planning for you once again:

Overview

You keep track of all tangible and intangible resources

Distribution of tasks

The respective project tasks can be planned through deadlines and clear responsibilities

Optimization

You can practice balanced personnel management and proactively avoid peak loads

Live view

Still available resources of the company become quickly identifiable

Digitalization

Effective working methods are established and operational idle time is avoided

Resource-saving

Possible sources of errors, delays due to resource bottlenecks quickly become apparent and can be eliminated

These facilitations are offered by the software from Innosoft

Innosoft offers some special features that go beyond them. After all, our service management system has been established in the industry for more than 28 years and has been continuously optimized.

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Extensive technician management

Our resource planning software meets the highest demands in machine and technician scheduling. In addition to the address information of resources and customers including contact persons, we offer you even more extensive options. For example, you can store information on skills, specializations, visa status in the personnel resources.

Just as good, you can also store the special features of a machine, so that you can also immediately read information such as machine type, installation and warranty date, as well as the order bill of materials of the machine already delivered.

More possibilities

The interactive, graphical planning board for project management is the heart of our ERP software. Here, all relevant projects are displayed as deployment bars and all activities are highlighted in color. In the resource overview, you can thus also see at a glance when there are still free or also already overloaded groups (e.g. locations) where.

In addition, you have the possibility to enter the capacity utilization calculation even more precisely by means of numerous filter options. At the same time, the current state of progress of any project can be accessed descriptively at this point.

The Innosoft user interface display can be highly customized depending on your requirements. If you are more involved into long-term projects with your company, then the large weekly and monthly displays are optimal in many cases. If you are more responsible for short-term operations, then the daily display, half-day display or 4-hour display fits clearly better.

Another advantage is the expandability of our system to helpful additional services. For example, deployment planning can be combined with Innosoft GeoMap module, which can be used to optimize deployment routes or find nearby technicians, for example.

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