Substantial project planning is a matter of course in everyday life. However, in areas where it could be important for companies, there are many reasons not to do.

Staff availability, skills, training, resource management and, last but not least, capacity planning, no matter how you would call it – project managers get funny pleasure here. The reasons can be diverse.

“How should this work out?”, “What else should I take into account in future?”, “How should I know who is available when?”

Popular phrases that sound very distant as a start, but deal intensively with resource management to reliably answer these questions. But what was the reason? Planning first of all means to work with the resources that are available, though they may be “scarce”. Above all, this means the competition between booked and available resources to achieve the maximum possible for your company; like in personal life, where we are usually faced with the choice of distributing the maximum benefit between expenses for apartment, food and vacation with a limited budget. Unfortunately, all needs certainly cannot be satisfied alike.

In day-to-day business and when planning new ideas and projects, such an approach can leave question marks. Normally, we create a respective project plan and ignore the need to question and assign available resources.

The obstacles in resource management

In general, it is not too easy to get a clear picture of available resources and their roles. Illnesses, dismissals and interpersonal problems often make everyday planning difficult or even destroy it. Even managers are often not always calculable when making ad-hoc decisions. But also important key persons may not be available at the desired time or are simply blocked. Already running projects also may require more time and capacity than planned. To enhance complexity even more and challenge the ability of a multi-project management, project members can  sometimes be assigned to several interdependent projects. As a start, the tasks can be divided into three segments:

• strategic segment
• tactical segment
• operating segment

With the help of planning sheets or capacity diagrams, but also capacity overviews, you will get a clear picture. These helpful functionalities usually are an integral part of project / multi-project management software.

Why resource management is that important?

With a tool, free resources can be identified very easily and quickly and can be used where they are needed. There is a complete transparency of all available and used resources. At the same time, you get a complete overview, absolute flexibility and you can re-schedule resources by will. Last but not least, your resources (project team members) are untroubled from overload and overbooking the best way.