How Does the Resource Management Software Help With Resource Utilization?

1. How Does the Resource Management Software Help with Resource Utilization? Project managers have a lot served on their plates. It’s their job to ensure the project is completed successfully on time and within the budget. Managing resources throughout the project cycle for success, and measuring resource utilization is the first step. In this shape-shifting nature of the projects, even the best team with all the resources and time, the project may fail or not live up to the exceptions if resources are not utilized efficiently. Resource utilization can be the formula for success. There are many factors, and careful planning is required especially when teams are working on multiple tasks simultaneously. This juggling act requires Project Managers to be on their toes as they must be aware of how productive their team is, what jobs’ they are working on, and most importantly whether or not they are using their time efficiently.

2. While we have discussed many times about careful resource planning and resource scheduling are crucial, so is one other often-forgotten part of the process- resource utilization. Resource utilization is a metric to monitor the workload of your employees. It gives room to Project Managers to identify the overburdened team members who have too many tasks and may have a reason to underperform, as well as underutilized staff. Both under and over-utilization of staff can lead to profit loss, employee burnout, customer dissatisfaction, missed sales opportunities, increased overheads, and many more. So, without any doubt resource utilization is one of the most important tools for many companies and gives a good start to measuring staff utilization. What is resource utilization? Resource utilization is the measurement of how many billable hours are assigned to employees. Therefore knowing your resource utilization is very important to understand your costs and helps you to make the right decision like adjusting your project plan, schedule, and budget even. Effective utilization of resources has proved a blessing for both employees and employers. Not only makes sure that employees have enough work to make their role viable and profitable, but on the other spectrum, it gives you a clear picture of overworking and burnout offering a more balanced work life. Types of resource utilization Even though there is only one definition of resource utilization, approaches are different to measure it that is used for different purposes in resource planning. Most commonly used types of resource utilization: •Overall Utilization: When measuring the overall resource utilization, the Project manager adds the overall time a team member spends on all billable and non-billable and strategic activities that he or she has assigned and compares it with the total time available with the individual. This helps determine whether the team members are being utilized fully. •Billable Utilization: Billable hours are productive hours that are charged to a client once the work is completed. Therefore, billable resource utilization is calculated when a client or project manager needs to

3. determine the number of billable hours of an employee excluding non- billable hours and strategic activities. This resource utilization method is very crucial while gauging and comparing employee performance. •Non-Billable utilization: All of the activities that exclude the production time are assigned under non-billable. This method is used when project managers need to access the efficiency of their resources. A high non- billable utilization might be a sign that the team is spending too much time on non-prioritized tasks. •Strategic Utilization: Organizations have long-term goals which are part of their strategic plans. To achieve those plans, they need to execute strategic projects and programs. Strategic resource utilization measures the number of hours spent on those activities. How to measure resource utilization? Today many companies use Resource planning software equipped with time tracking and resource management features to measure, track, and manage their utilizationat any point in time.Here are some general steps you can follow to measure resource utilization with the help of resource planning software. 1.Define billable and non-billable hours The foremost step to measure resource utilization is to define billable and non- billable activities accurately that your team will execute. Once you define that you can calculate overall utilization resource utilization. 2. Determine the available hours of each team member Allocate the hours to each team member based on the contract, which can either be full-time part-time, or contractual hours among others. Now you have the information you need to assign work and use resource planning software to measure resource utilization. 3.Use a timesheet to measure resource utilization Timesheets are important to measure resource utilization because they let you document your team's time 4.Use the resource utilization formula

4. Based on your needs you can choose to measure billable and non-billable resource utilization. Simply use the resource utilization formula primarily to measure resource utilization. 5. Determine employee productivity Based on resource utilization analysis, it gets much easier to know which employee is overburdened, which one is less burdened and which employee is underperforming on the peer comparatives based on the work they have done. What does a staff utilization report mean? The major goal of analyzing employee utilization reports is to gain a clear perspective of each employee's workload. This information will help you to manage your resources more effectively and make smarter decisions. Here are some of the ways you can use utilization data to drive up the organization's growth. Resource Management First and foremost, the utilization report helps you to plan your resources accordingly. This means that •Optimize resource pool: having found out whether you have spare capacity or not enough capacity, you can reallocate resources accordingly. •Plan hiring: Resource utilization allows you to do more than simple plan engagements- it helps you to foresee your recruitment needs and plan accordingly. •Set goals: When your team members are tracking time towards specific tasks or are in the middle of working on them it helps set clear goals and remove confusion. •Making training and development decisions: the span of inefficiency is tracked, that is also because there is a knowledge gap in the team and it’s time to enhance the learning. Manage scope creep Projects tend to increase deadlines and budget and if that goes unnoticed projects can end up profiles. If you are tracking time and utilization, you can spot scope creep early and negotiate fees and time before the project overruns.

5. Create better proposal With more insight into how much time certain types of projects take and what level of staffing is required. This will increase your ability to estimate more accurately when preparing for similar proposals in the future. Target more profitable services By knowing which of your services are more profitable you can focus more wisely on the right part of your business. There is no need for your sales team to waste valuable time on leads that don’t align with the organizational growth strategy. How does resource management software help with resource utilization? eResource Scheduler uses data points for calculation: •Availability (time off as well as holidays) •Bookings (planned work hours) •timesheet (recorded work hours) This way you can calculate the estimated and actual time utilization. This resource planning software comes with a reporting suite that allows you to visualize your data and share it with your team during the actually utilized working hours.