Resource management is an essential step in project management, as it ensures the right resources are available to the team at the right time, guaranteeing that the work is completed on schedule and without waste.
Resources can be physical or team-related, ranging from human, financial, material, and technological resources to time. These resources are identified during the planning stage, after the scope has been defined, and must be closely monitored throughout the project.
Neglecting resource management during a project means taking on new, previously unmapped risks, which can result in bottlenecks, waste, budget overruns, and even impacts on the quality of deliverables.
Steps in Project Resource Management
The PMBOK® identifies six essential steps for efficient resource management:
1. Plan Resource Management
In this initial step, it is necessary to understand and define how the processes related to the required resources will occur. This step also identifies which methods will be used, how resources will be acquired or managed, what measures will be taken to ensure their availability, among other decisions.
2. Estimate Resources
After the previous definitions, it is time to estimate what will be needed to execute the project. An important tip is to revisit what was planned to ensure nothing is left out and that the estimate does not become disconnected from reality.
3. Acquisition
With the proper estimates in place, we can move on to acquiring or reallocating resources so that the project has everything it needs to get started.
4. Team Development
After allocating technological resources or even equipment, it is time to develop the project’s human resources, ensuring high performance and that the team is truly ready to carry out the project.
Although there is an ideal time to begin this development, it can extend throughout the project, since the team must remain aligned and motivated in order to achieve the project’s objective.
5. Team Management
In addition to development, the team must be managed so that its members maintain a good relationship with one another and with the project’s sponsors. In this step, performance is tracked, feedback is provided, problems are resolved, active communication is established, changes are managed, and collaborative decisions are encouraged.
6. Resource Control
Controlling available resources ensures they are allocated according to plan, available at the right time and to the right people. And, although it is the last step, it only concludes with the delivery of the project.
Challenges in Resource Management
Without a doubt, the main challenge in resource management is taking on too many simultaneous projects — sometimes more than the team can handle. This mainly happens due to a lack of visibility into the actual capacity of teams and resources.
The use of visual tools such as Gantt Charts, Status Reports, and even calendar applications can be very useful for portfolio management and project resource management.
Another factor that can become a challenge in resource management is a lack of visibility between teams, which generates conflicts related to resource availability and impacts the ability to meet deadlines, or even leads to scope increases.
Errors in resource capacity planning can also result in challenges for project resource management. For this reason, this step should never be skipped, as doing so risks delivering a project plan that is misaligned with resource needs.
Impacts of Poor Resource Management
Poor or inefficient project resource management can lead to impacts such as:
- Schedule delays;
- Increased costs;
- More rework;
- Team burnout;
- Low quality of deliverables;
- Loss of schedule control;
- Increased project risks.
Optimize Resource Management with Interact PRJ
By using software to manage a company’s project portfolio, it is possible to centralize tasks, deadlines, and teams in one place, ensuring efficient management aligned with delivery deadlines.
Interact PRJ, for example, enables the management of every stage of a project, while also integrating everyone involved so they can work together to deliver efficient results.
With this solution, the project manager goes far beyond simply tracking tasks — being able to estimate human, material, and financial resources and link them to their respective activities according to the work calendar. This directly addresses a recurring challenge mentioned above: the lack of visibility into actual capacity.
The Interact Suite solution offers applications for monitoring the progress of tasks and subtasks, automatic sending of messages, pending items, and deadlines, as well as a calendar for controlling resource usage.
And, to make the routine even easier, Interact PRJ features the Project Assistant, an artificial intelligence capability that enhances project management through automations that structure, control, and provide visibility across every stage.
Among the available features, we highlight a few:
- Reducing manual effort in building and documenting project risks;
- Automatically planning schedules;
- Balancing teams by viewing and adjusting resource allocation;
- Expanding visibility with reports and dashboards for status, progress, and tracking of efforts, costs, and risks;
- Optimizing resources with automatic suggestions for task redistribution, among others.
Click here to learn about Interact PRJ and discover how to manage project resources more efficiently!
