The Ultimate Guide to Resource Management for Beginners

The art of managing your resources is one of the most important things in business. By using resources effectively, you can be more productive and better execute goals. You’ll work smarter, not harder.

The term resource management sounds simple, but in practice, it takes much time and effort to understand its key elements and patterns. You have to be strategic about goals and manage your resources carefully to get ahead. This includes understanding your objectives and developing a good process for resource management planning. With this, you can better oversee resource utilization, plan resource capacity and manage time.

How to build an efficient resource management system? This is what this ultimate guide will help you to achieve. We will learn about:

1. Resource Management Definition

2. Main Advantages of Resource Management

3. Working Process and Resource Management System

4. Resource Management Software

5. How to Plan your Resources with ActivityTimeline 

Resource Management Definition

What is resource management? According to Shopify’s Business Encyclopedia, resource management is the process by which businesses manage their various resources effectively. It is the process of deciding which resources you need, which ones to use, and how to make them work together. Resources are everything that you need to accomplish your tasks. Resource planning is the process of deciding which resources you need for a task/project, what those resources can do, and how they should be used.

There are two types of them: human and non-human resources. These could be the skills of the team members, equipment, the type of software to use, etc.

Main Advantages of Resource Management

Resource management is a simple yet powerful concept. It’s the ability to identify and manage the resources to achieve your goals, so you need to make sure you’re using them wisely. Here are some reasons why you need to focus on resource management:

• It allows to maximize the efficiency of the processes

During the project lifecycle, all of the elements are tightly connected as one mechanism, and if one cog is broken, the mechanism will stop. If you manage resources in the right way, monitor capacity, track workloads, in order to prevent work over, or underload, the inner work processes will be continuing. Moreover, constant resource monitoring allows to see the potential bottlenecks and eliminate them.

• Helps you to create a clear, comprehensive picture during the project planning

Resource management is closely connected with project management. It is difficult to disagree that wise resource utilization influences project success hugely. The right resource distribution ensures that teams will meet the deadlines and deliver projects on time.

• Resource management allows you to plan for the long terms

Preliminary planning is a key to success, as later it helps to save time, effort and avoid obstacles. When you clearly know who is doing what and when it will be done, the following project planning processes become much easier. When you understand the resource capacity, resource allocation is no more a problem. Managers effortlessly build future plans and strategies based on the right resource utilization.

• Managing resources allows getting more done in less time

Resource management involves setting priorities, schedule management on both team and individual levels, tasks delegation, and monitoring. As a result, resources always have a balanced workload and can finish their work on time and even faster.

Working Process and Resource Management System

While running a business/project people often face the problem of waste. It can be a waste of precious time, money, and, of course, resources. But the following and bigger problem is that we’re not measuring that waste and project resources lack. If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it. So how can we solve this problem?

With the help of the resource management system, which will help to track the resource distribution and utilization. The first thing you’ll need to do is to figure out exactly which things you’re spending your time on. For most businesses, it’s going to be a combination of project management, sales, and customer service.

With the promotion of remote work, outsourcing, and international offices, it has become much harder to keep abreast of events. That’s why resource management systems are a must-have for companies and can be created with the help of the right resource management tools.

Resource Management Software

Business is a lot more than a single employee, a computer, and a small office. There are employees, contractors, and a myriad of other resources that all have to be managed – otherwise, your business won’t survive. How can you make sure that all these different pieces work together smoothly? The answer involves resource management software.

Most of the world’s companies use resource management software to stay on the same page with all of the teams. It is a tool that simplifies the management of employees, facilitates resource planning, allocation, and tracking.

Of course, there are thousands of resource management apps and platforms. An average user may get confused while searching for the best choice. As an option, you may try one of the most popular and widespread platforms – Jira. This solution is used by millions of people and was developed to help various teams to manage different types of work – from software development and customer support to business operations. It suits businesses of all types – small start-ups, mature companies, and huge enterprises.

Among key benefits are improved visibility, clear prioritization, and high-level planning. One more advantage is the possibility to integrate with 3d party add-ons, which expand the capabilities of the platform and allow to add more useful features for users.

Jira provides lots of add-ons for resource planning and management. If you’re not sure where to start, you may try Jira in combination with a resource management add-on for Jira ActivityTimeline.

Plan your Resources with ActivityTimeline 

ActivityTimeline perfectly suits resource management needs. It’ll come in handy for teams of different sizes and types. The app allows managing both human, and non-human resources with the help of meaningful individual/team timelines.

With the help of a scalable dashboard, you can assign and track tasks instantly. Create different events, specific skills and assign positions to your users, all while tracking their work. Manage vacations, sick leaves, and more.

The cross-project view for shared resources helps to receive a comprehensive picture of the workflows without effort. Timesheeting, workload, and availability reporting under singlehood. App even provides a personal workspace for users to track their own tasks&projects.

ActivityTimeline is the best choice for those who just start to investigate resource management, as its user-friendly dashboard makes resource planning effortless.

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