Planning and managing multiple projects is not an easy task even if you are an experienced project manager. It’s a bumpy ride for you if you are new to project resource planning. However, a common challenge that all project managers face is multi-project planning and handling various stakeholders and clients. Project planning includes deciding about resources, tackling email trails, determining schedules while keeping in mind the costs. Now, imagine if you must do this for multiple projects together? Using the right resource planning software could completely transform how you handle multi-project planning. Unfortunately, only about 26% of organizations implement resource planning software to plan and allocate resources and only about 36% of businesses use such tools very often. About 60% of projects get completed in the decided budget and only 50% are delivered on time. So, let’s see how a project resource planning tool can come to your rescue.
What is Resource Planning Software?
A tool or software that is beneficial for various businesses and industries for project planning, resource allocation, scheduling, resource management, and tracking utilization. Resource planning software is a very useful tool as it differentiates organizations and makes them more competitive. It enables project managers to not only plan, but also manage projects efficiently, control costs, and deliver high-quality projects. A project planning software is also an online platform that facilitates collaboration among various teams, projects, team members, and clients to ensure smooth execution and delivery.
How can a Resource Planning Software Help in Multi-Project Planning?
1. Do project planning efficiently
To manage a project, you need to handle a team, people in different locations, various resource types, vendors, stakeholders, etc. This becomes even tougher when you have to manage multiple projects simultaneously. So, how can you plan multiple projects effectively while ensuring you define all tasks well, identify resources, calculate the time and effort without any errors? Especially when doing multi-project planning, it’s difficult to ensure how many people are needed for each project, what are the skills required for each, and if there could be any dependencies. A resource planning software can streamline all this for you and multi-project planning becomes easy.
2. A configurable tool that can be adapted as per requirements
Cloud-based resource planning software like eResource Scheduler comes with highly configurable filters, views, fields, and forms. This enables you to effectively manage your resources and multiple projects in a few simple steps. Even complex tasks such as project resource planning, resource allocation, utilization and profitability analysis can be completed in just a few clicks. You can also change the custom-defined fields according to your needs. It’s also easy to manage multiple working calendars for your teams working out of different locations.
3. Structured resource planning along with precise availability reports
To manage the operations, a project manager requires accurate information about the available budget, know the resource availability, and develop project plans. Using traditional methods such as spreadsheets cannot be relied on to provide accurate data and output. But implementing resource planning software can provide you with precise availability reports, and thus, integrated availability data. The project resource planning tools also update availability reports automatically and that too in real-time. This helps project managers to do project planning and resource management for multiple projects seamlessly.
4. Central location for all the data about projects and resources
Sharing data and files becomes tough when working with distributed teams that are based in different locations or geographies. How do you ensure that version issues aren’t happening or how do you find the best resources across teams? Using resource planning software for sharing data, reports, or dashboards, or checking the availability of any resource-based out of any location becomes very easy. By using a resource planning software like eResource Scheduler, you can upload files, streamline your data, easily edit, or share documents whenever you need and in just a few clicks.
5. Evaluate your team’s capacity or availability
To start doing multi-project planning and resource allocation, the first step is to see if you have enough resources at hand. For that, you need clear visibility of resource availability and your team’s capacity to identify people who are available for new tasks or projects. Using resource planning software provides organization-wide visibility of resources, availability, capacity, schedules, leave plans, holidays, etc. You can easily find resources that are available as per your schedule and check their capacity. This information and awareness bridges the gap between overall team capacity and availability and helps in taking the right decisions.
6. Assign best resources to suitable tasks or projects
Imagine if you have clear visibility about all the resources and multiple projects and teams, you can easily check the status of projects and monitor the utilization of your team. If you’ve assigned some resources on multiple projects and they seem overbooked, the tool highlights that and you can take appropriate measures. With resource planning software, you can easily check which resource is working on which project and how is their performance in just a few clicks. By using its advanced filters, you can find the best people for a particular task as per their skills, interests, availability, etc. This way, resource planning software helps to align the best resources to tasks matching their skills and brings efficiency.
7. Prioritize deliveries
While handling multiple projects, it’s tough to manage multiple milestones and deliveries. A resource planning software helps to break bigger tasks into manageable chunks, divide the workload efficiently, and set priorities. You can easily identify projects that are high priority and tasks which are not so urgent. Focusing on top priority tasks will also help you decide how to do multi-project planning. You should also make sure that you are not assigning important and high priority tasks to just one or two people. A resource planning software can again come in handy here. It enables to prioritize deliveries while doing project planning, resource scheduling, and workload management.
8. Monitor projects, schedules, and performance on a regular basis
To gain a realistic and clear view of your resources, projects, status, schedules, and utilization, it’s best to use a resource planning tool. You not only get the flexibility to alter plans but you can also monitor your team’s performance, workload, and utilization in real-time. This helps to flag any probable challenges in advance and avoid overbooking or burnout. For example, if you see that a particular resource has high utilization and is overbooked, 80%, then you can re-assign some work to another resource.
9. Multiple permission levels as per roles and responsibilities
The right resource planning software allows multiple permission levels for people. A cloud-based resource planning software can help streamline various projects, processes, and help you to provide permission levels to people as per their designation, roles, etc. This way, they can easily view the tasks assigned to them, their schedules, and plans, fill in timesheets, etc. You can give view-only permission to your clients to check dashboards, status, project plans, reports, etc. But managers and team leads can have a create or edit permission where they can create and alter plans, schedules, create reports, etc.
10. Real-time tracking and cost management
A resource planning software updates in real-time, because of which you can track the performance, productivity, and utilization of resources and overall team on a daily or monthly basis. It’s easy to monitor how multiple projects are doing, and if all is on track. If you feel that you should reassign some people to some other projects, then you can do so in a few clicks. The resource planning software also helps in controlling the budgets and costs on every milestone. You can assess the financial condition of all your projects easily and make well-informed decisions.
eResource Scheduler – A Leading Resource Planning Software for Multi-Project Planning
Enbraun’s flagship tool named eResource Scheduler is a boon for project managers who want to succeed at multi-project planning and execution. It enables businesses to create feasible plans and schedules, enables better coordination among various teams, and optimizes their productivity. eResource Scheduler comes with a scalable design that helps to modify the configuration so that you can tackle the resource planning and scheduling needs of the organization. You can easily create new plans, schedules or modify the current ones easily. What’s more? The Gantt chart functionality provides a detailed and clear view of resource schedules, availability, and utilization. So, find the benefits of this tool yourself by booking a free trial now! But, if you want to dig deeper, check a few other resource planning tools and compare them.
