The biggest time-consumer and expense for a professional service firm is its personnel. Incorrectly managing your team members can ruin a project that would have otherwise been successful. That’s why effective resource planning tools are essential to your business’ success. They can help keep project costs down, while making it possible to deliver projects on time and on budget.

Resource planning tools will ensure you understand your team’s resource capacity and resource availability to take on successful projects. After all, you have to have the right combination of skills in the right quantity to complete all the projects in your firm’s backlog— which is why resource management is so important.

Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint are two of the best resource planning tools on the market today. This software offers resource planning technology that can help you manage your projects more efficiently and effectively.

In this article, we’ll cover what resource management and resource planning are and how to identify the best resource planning tools for the project. In addition, we’ll explain how to use Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint in managing resources and projects more effectively. So keep reading!

What Are Resource Planning And Resource Management?

Resource planning is the process of forecasting and allocating resources for projects. Resource management is the act of overseeing the use of resources in order to meet project objectives. Together, these two concepts help ensure that your projects have the people, tools, and materials they need to succeed.

Technology has always played a role in resource planning and management, but recent advances have made it easier than ever to use a resource planning tool to your advantage. A resource planning software like Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint can help you automatically generate plans based on your project portfolio, track actual resource usage, and compare it to your forecasted needs. Not to mention its robust CRM system to track your pipeline, a fully integrated accounting system for seamless recording of labor and expenses, and the ability to compare the effort to your planned budget.

Below, we will explore three resource planning features your company should be taking into consideration to maximize efficiency in your capacity planning and optimize your personnel and operations.

1. Resource Planning Technology Can Help With Staffing

Making sure your projects are staffed with people who have the correct skill sets and the resource capacity to do the work will help you manage your projects in the most efficient manner possible. 

You need to have a good understanding of what skills and experience are required for each task, as well as an accurate picture of who on your team is available and when.

Deltek’s resource planning tool gives you visibility into the skills and availability of your team so that you can make informed staffing decisions. You can also use the resource management tools to help you with things like training and succession planning so that you always have the right people in place to get the job done.

With Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint, you can:

• Understand what skills and experience are required for each task
• Get an accurate picture of team and resource availability
• Make informed staffing decisions
• Search for employees to staff your projects based on those required skills

 Take the guesswork out of meeting your future staffing needs with Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint’s resource management tool and effectively identify the right resources for your project and staff your projects more efficiently.

2. Resource Planning Technology Helps Project Level Management

Once your projects are staffed, your project managers will need to be able to review and monitor the progress as the work is done.  Project management tools give project managers the ability to see how their projects are progressing against the budget and schedule.

Making sure you have the right information when you need it is critical to making good decisions about your resources. Vantagepoint lets your project managers function in their intended role – managing the actual work being done and making sure the deadlines are met. 

The dashboards and reports included in the application give your project managers a readily available and configurable set of tools to compare the actual effort being applied to the projects against the budgeted hourly amounts within the project. Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint’s project view of labor plans lets your project managers review their projects one at a time and easily scroll through their selected projects.

Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint also provides the ability to plan for projects that are still in an “in-pursuit” stage, meaning your project managers can create what-if scenarios for staffing needs before the contract gets signed. Based on factors that you decide, these plans can either be included in overall utilization for the company or excluded from utilization and scheduling calculations.

This can help your resource management team to better understand where your company’s efforts will be spent and make hiring or resource planning decisions accordingly.

3. Resource Planning Technology Can Help Enterprise-Level Management

Now that your project managers are effectively managing their own projects, you’ll need the ability to back up and look at the “10,000 foot view” of your enterprise and all of your projects. 

Enter Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint’s resource view and resource planning reports. With this management tool, your resource managers can see all of your scheduled resources and to which projects they are assigned. 

One of these resource planning tools is a color-coded grid that quickly identifies which resources are over-utilized, under-utilized, or properly utilized on a period-by-period basis, whether those periods be months, weeks, or different intervals. 

It gives your resource managers the ability to review these assignments and make any necessary adjustments between resources to better balance the workload, all from the resource view screen. Once the changes are saved, alerts can notify the employees of any changes to their assignments automatically within the application.

Additionally, in resource planning reports, your executive team can see a high-level overview of all projects, or they can choose to dive into the details of specific projects. The reports can be run for an entire enterprise or focus on a single project portfolio management, business unit, or project manager. 

The report output can be customized to show the data that is most important to your organization and can even be exported into Excel for further analysis or for integration into other company systems.

Final Thoughts on Resource Planning

Proper resource planning and the use of resource management tools can help manage workload and ensure project success. Deltek Vision and Vantagepoint give resource managers the ability to assign the skills possessed by your team members to their resource record, then search based on those skills and availability and make assignments to projects based on those search results. 

Once the projects are staffed, your project managers can use project reports and project view to monitor their individual projects making sure deadlines are met. Resource managers can further review all resources and their assigned projects making sure that the overall workload is balanced and all employees are properly utilized.

With this kind of capacity planning, you can be confident that the right resources are assigned to the right team members. Learn more about Deltek Vantagepoint and Deltek Vision and how it can help with resource planning and resource management today.

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