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Resource management is all about getting the right people and things to the right places at the right time. Officially, it’s the organizational function dedicated to coordinating and overseeing tools, processes, and systems that help provide managers with appropriate resources in an appropriate timeframe.
In an emergency context, resource management takes on life-and-death importance; but that’s not to say that resource management doesn’t matter when it comes to business-as-usual work. Done right, resource management helps all teams better allocate their resources. But just as responders will have their own set of resourcing challenges, so too will everyday teams. Here are the common resource management challenges of business-as-usual work:
- Poor resource capacity planning. Culprit number one: poor resource capacity planning, which invariably leads to poor resource allocation. Often managers don’t understand the full scope of resource demands for either special project or business-as-usual work demands. And as such, the best resources, whether they be personnel, equipment, facilities, etc., end up getting overbooked and overburdened with trivial projects by managers.
- Additionally, teams have the tendency of deploying the wrong resources for project work and end up wasting crucial time. This happens especially when communication flows are inefficient, and resource documentation is inadequate.
- Lack of transparency to decision makers. Sure, it’s counter-intuitive. But even though vital to the well-functioning of companies, business-as-usual work is often less transparent to decision makers than special project work. It’s even considered unproductive or expendable, while special project work is treated as lucrative and time sensitive.
- So when special project work does enter the picture, any priority given to business-as-usual work goes out the window. What’s more, the project ends up cannibalizing the available resources for business-as-usual work.
- Geographic distribution of teams. Even in this age of multinationals, companies have a tough time dealing with the geographical distribution of corporate teams. Geographically-dispersed teams will generally experience far greater difficulty in coordinating resources than teams whose members are more geographically proximate.
So with those resource management challenges what can managers do to improve resource allocation for business-as-usual work? For starters, managers can do more to raise the visibility of business-as-usual work to decision makers.
But often, the resource management technology teams deploy will annotate business-as-usual work as if it were special project work. That certainly doesn’t help decision makers get a clear sense of the value of business-as-usual work. Find a solution that lays out tasks and activities clearly; it will help justify resource allocation for business-as-usual activities.
Not sure what technology solution can help solve the resource management challenges of business-as-usual work? Download our comprehensive guide to resource management.
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