Why You Need a Project Management Tool for Resource Planning
Let’s be honest: it can be quite exhausting to monitor the available resources at your company and assign the right ones to certain projects – while keeping an eye on the costs. And that’s especially true when you’re tracking everything in a messy spreadsheet (or worse — in your mind).
That’s where project portfolio management (PPM) software comes in. A PPM lets you easily and quickly allocate resources to particular workloads with a few clicks. What’s more, you can do that while monitoring everything from workload pipeline, to costs, to available staff, and priorities.
In this guide, we’ll take a deeper look at why you need a PPM app for streamlining your business’s resource capacity planning. Let’s dive in.
What is Resource Capacity Planning?
Resource capacity planning starts with prioritizing projects. Next is (starting with the highest priorities) determining the available resources and desired tasks and allocating the right resources to those tasks. It’s extremely effective for companies to focus on the top priority projects and then make the most of their hours in order to serve their customers at their best.
Example of Resource Capacity Planning
Let’s start with a simple example we all understand: the kitchen of a busy restaurant. First we want to prioritize the orders. Perhaps the most important order is based on how long ago the customer ordered or how important that customer is to the business.
Next, we might assign parts of the most important order to different staff in the kitchen. The main course goes to the chef, the salad to the salad station and so on. We would then create a schedule with the correct order of things to be delivered to the customers as well as the dependencies such that if something gets delivered early (or late) that the time between courses is maintained.
In aggregate all the orders would give us a clear understanding of what parts of the kitchen are at, over, or under capacity (and if we can take any more orders at any point in time).
How a Project Management Program Helps With Resource Capacity Planning
Project management apps help businesses with resource planning in many ways, such as:
Successful Project Planning
Project planning can be tough when you’re unclear about the available resources, the tasks that need to be completed, and the costs of resources. A project management PPM program lets you develop an effective resource planning strategy and easily track the available staff, quickly assign them their tasks, and have a bird’s eye view of the overall progress.
Easy Visibility of Available Staff
The key to the success of any project is allocating its different tasks to the right people and in the right order. Furthermore, change is to be expected and companies need the capability to easily shift projects and recalculate the resource plan.
Project management PPM apps let you keep track of each member of your workforce to ensure certain tasks are performed by the people you chose for them. Most importantly, you can add or remove members from different jobs (or even entire projects) with a few clicks.
Productive Budget Management
It’s obvious that a project won’t be profitable unless you plan all the costs that will be required for its completion beforehand.
Most project management software offers real-time budgeting so that you can allocate certain amounts of budget to various jobs and keep track of all the costs involved. Often, such a program will give you an overview of billable hours, billable expenses, total invoiceable funds, and so on.
Faster Business Growth
Using a project management tool for capacity planning means you’ll save many hours each day as most of the annual tasks like resource usage and budget calculation will be streamlined. This way, you’ll get a chance to work more on the business instead of in the business, allowing you to scale it up as fast as possible.
Another way project management programs can accelerate your business’s growth is by allowing the successful completion of projects. It’s because these tools improve your project’s success chances by helping you complete it promptly and within the given budget. It leads to more customer satisfaction which will help grow your company by leaps and bounds. Speed optimized by WpSpeedFixer
Final Words
If you want to manage your company’s projects productively, you’ll have to escape the traditional management methods like spreadsheets and paper.
The best available solution is a dedicated project portfolio management (PPM) system. PPM software is optimized for helping you organize your business’s systems like capacity planning, resource allocation, and workforce management. This way, project management PPM programs can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
One of the simplest project management PPM tools you can find is WorkOtter. We’re a cloud based simple, sensible, and supportable project management solution focused on providing powerful management and resource capacity planning of your most important priorities.
CLICK HERE to sign up at WorkOtter today!