Why You Shouldn’t Forgo a Resource Management Plan in Your Next Project

An effective resource management plan can allow for visibility and tracking across all projects, enabling positive adjustments and better decision-making when tackling workloads.

Modern-day management principles stretch broadly across many disciplines and industries in today’s global marketplace. When it comes to resourcing and allocating people and assets, the effective division of labor, goods, and equipment is vital in providing exceptional service. Simply put, effective resource management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and allocation of capital, people, or technology to a project. And yet, these unassuming practices may have equally many in-depth considerations to review with management-intertwined factors to understand from a leadership viewpoint.

A “good” Resource Management Plan (RMP) divides roles, times and responsibilities; however, a “great” RMP confers and assigns ownership, escalation, and accountability. An effective RMP establishes that the right people are on the job while providing an opportunity to mitigate risk via proactive action, review, and ensuring that the overall efficiency consistently improves. Teams are brought together with goals and positions aligned to leverage learning transparencies that drive further value-added activities intrinsically.

By enabling effective prioritization of tasks and projects, S.M.A.R.T* tracking of goals, and establishing protective buffers around project milestones, an effective RMP will allow a system that encourages proactive learning and education to all teams involved. A repeatable and proactive process improvement system is established with teams that learn iteratively with each project completed. Withum’s Management Consulting Services team can identify the people, process, and technology necessary to bridge an RMP’s desired effectiveness from “good” to “great”. This approach also establishes personalized operational procedures that will stabilize and position opportunities for success and further resilience during uncertain business changes.

By having a “great” RMP that brings everything together, hurdles and burnouts are further avoided through accessible and visible controls. “Audit-trails” that could be in place would drastically help understand any changes made to an allocation plan at any point in time. “Recalibration” activities in certain project milestones to review command, structure, and the lessons learned would provide further cross-functional insights. A responsive system between the PMO and the functional teams that champions feedback loops will also encourage self-policing and periodical review of how other systems can improve with time.

A proactive, transparent, and communicative RMP invites team members of all levels to understand the division and allocation of project resources. As such, it provides a healthy and educational discussion floor for further contingency considerations and incremental planning.

*The S.M.A.R.T. criteria for goals and objectives feature specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound attributes.

Author: Jones Yiu | [email protected]

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