Resource Management Part 1 - Introduction to the Tools

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As requests come in and team members are assigned to work, are you sure that users with the right skill sets have the availability to add more work to their plate? Are users under allocated and have time available or do they have too much work and are stressing to get it all completed on time? By adopting a data driven approach to resource management, you can confidently answer these questions that users, leaders and executives may be asking.  

Before digging into the various tools that Workfront offers to manage resources, it is important to understand each tool’s purpose, and what type of work manager is most likely to benefit from each. To kickoff the Resource Management series, this week focuses on possible work manager roles and a downloadable PDF detailing purpose, audience and expected outcomes for each resource management tool.

WORK MANAGER ROLES

Organizational structure can strongly influence the way that work and resources are managed.  This typically creates various job functions to perform the tasks of resource scheduling, work demand allocation, and capacity management.  These roles can be focused on specific bodies of work or can manage resources in a cross-functional organization.  Here are some Work Manager roles to consider:

• Leadership is responsible for setting a clear vision and mission so that others in the organization can prioritize and understand why their work matters.  They may also be directly involved in approving key initiatives.

• Project Managers and Project Leads typically own or partially own a specific scope of work. In some cases they may have a dedicated team, although more often than not, they are sharing their resources and may not have a lot of formal authority over who will be assigned to their work or for how long.

• Team Leads may be focused on short sprints of work that are assigned to them by a business owner, or may be asked to delegate ad-hoc work as it is requested by various parts of the organization.

• Department Leads will generally manage a group of specialists that can work on initiatives within their own department, but may also be expected to contribute to cross-functional initiatives led by other areas of the organization.

• Resource Managers are responsible for ensuring that people with the proper skill sets and availability are assigned to work.  They may be very centralized where a traffic manager routes all work that comes in, or specialized where each resource manager covers a different functional area or line of business.

Each of these different stakeholders will have different roles in organizational resource management and may leverage different tools within Workfront to perform their duties.

SELECTING THE RIGHT TOOL

There are various tools available in the Workfront platform to assist with resource scheduling, measuring current resource utilization and availability, and planning for the demand of future work against existing workforce capacity. 

• Resource Scheduler
• Workload Balancer
• Resource Planner

Each of these tools may be leveraged by different stakeholders in the resource management process. Furthermore, they will each serve a different purpose ranging from short-term tactical assignment needs to longer-term strategic planning needs. The data sheet below provides a high level overview to help provide context around the purpose, audience, and outcomes of each resource management tool.  

Click here to download the data sheet as a 1-page PDF, to save and to share.

MORE TO COME

The Resource Management Did You Know? blog series will continue with best practices to ensure the data that drives these tools is complete and accurate, as well as additional recommendations for getting the most value out of each of these resource management tools. Keep an eye out for upcoming blogs on the following topics: 

• Work Planning and Resource Scheduling (Workload Balancer and Scheduler)
• Strategic Capacity and Demand Management (Resource Planner)
• Identify and grow your Resource Management Maturity

To ask other like-minded administrators on resource management best practices or specific use cases, post a question to the Community forum or join us Wednesday, August 19 at 9 am MST for a 1-hour live Ask the Expert webinar on the topic of resource management where you can ask any question to Workfront Sr. Director, Product Management, Michael Swan.