Resource Management, the 5 most common mistakes and how to fix them
Agathe Placet
Content manager
June 22, 2023
5 min
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As in any service business, resources within your office or your ESN are both precious and limited. Any error in their management can therefore be punished by a financial or human loss, or even both.
Our daily experience, with companies like yours, too often reveals consultants, managers or staffing managers feeling lost or feeling like they are on a battlefield due to a skills shortage to complete such a mission, all-round changes during the project without a real strategic vision or even resource allocation conflicts.
It therefore seems important to us to capitalize on everything we have learned and are learning every day alongside our customers and to present to you, in this article, the 5 most common mistakes when it comes to Ressource Management and how to limit their occurrence as much as possible.
We've talked about it several times on this blog, The data makes the Ressource Management. But once we've said that, everything still needs to be done, because there's data and there's data.
For example, you can rely on some basic information on your consultants (number of days of availability declared at the beginning of the month, core competence, secondary skills, level of expertise by skill, location...) to decide who to position yourself on which mission. But the truth on the ground will catch up with you, because the unexpected is intrinsically linked to project management and therefore to resource management.
Absences due to illness, leave and RTT, unexpected delays... everything impacts your workload plan and must be integrated into your resource management tool at the risk otherwise of having to adapt your customer projects to operational reality on a daily basis.
Your Staffing tool must either allow you to enter, on each employee's sheet, their absences, holidays... orextract this information from your HR software.
This centralization of data should allow you to generate project team simulations and to play with different scenarios to find the best possible combination.
Arbitrarily allocating a consultant to a given mission is a strategy that is doomed to failure. This classic error generally has its source in a lack of visibility on the part of your staffing teams.
Visibility on the availability of the employee, as we saw above, but also on his current level of competence, Hard Skills and Soft Skills acquired thanks to the previous mission, as well as his desires for technical, but also sectoral development (does he want to be assigned to missions in insurance, energy and Utilities, banking, banking and financial markets...).
Your employees should easily be able to fill in and update all these elements in your resource management tool independently. This information must also be just as easily accessible to your staffing manager in order to be taken into account when setting up project teams.
Are you still managing your mission schedules and resource allocation on Excel ? Where you expect to save time and budget by migrating to a tool dedicated to Ressource Management, you are in fact losing much more in operational efficiency, quality of interventions and development of your teams.
All the stakeholders in your resource management must be able to access, within their scope, the project completion rate, the resources concerned and mobilized and their allocation.
This allows them to make adjustments at their level and also provides a sense of transparency within your company and its teams, limiting the risks of misalignment.
Excel was not built for Ressource Management, this tool unfortunately does not offer you these benefits and even less the automatic updating of data according to field feedback.
Outline your various management needs resources and take a moment to Benchmark the different solutions present on the market.
Opt for a solution that allows you At the very least of centralize all your data, from visualize very simply your charge plan and others Reportings And of notify the persons concerned when the mission deviates from what was originally defined.
Our team would be delighted to make you a demo of our approach to responding to Challenges of our customers thanks to our staffing software.
Of the vision derives from the strategy and from the strategy Derives from shares (prospecting, talent recruitment...) and the operations (the progress of customer missions). It is therefore normal to favor a communication Top Down. This allows you to ensure that the sum of operational actions corresponds to the strategy and objectives of the Quarter and of the year.
But for obvious reasons, your Ressource Management cannot eat only the instructions of the Top management or even only managers, because they are not the ones who carry out the mission for the client. How can you know if not, for example, that the relationship between a particular operational person at the client's office and such a consultant at your firm is not good, putting the entire mission at risk.
Toute disconnection, in either direction, greatly increases the risk of loss of motivation and a certain lack of accountability with respect to the mission.
Here too, haveA software of Ressource Management will save you a lot of headaches, these features of multi-directional communication being basic elements of such a tool. And since tools are not everything, your processes must include reports that allow consultants to understand the strategy decided above and at Top management to feel the work done at the end customer.
The results of a project are more than just the margin rate. Sometimes, the teachings that come out are much more important than financial indicators.
They allow you to greatly increase efficiency and productivity on future missions, thus placing you in a position of expectation and not reaction.
Your resource management should avoid the vagaries of the field, the customer, or your team by helping you learn from previous projects.
What were the difficulties encountered? How did you Staffed Which position in relation to this need? What expectations did you have about recruiting internal or external skills?
By collecting statistics, mission notes and cross-data, your Staffing tool is meant to be your perfect co-pilot to gain in foresight.
When we go through these 5 common pitfalls of resource management, three fundamental trends emerge:
Although the pitfalls are still numerous, the good news is that for each of these difficulties, you now have the keys to overcome them and successfully manage resources.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our white paper “Staffing management: 4 processes deciphered”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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