3 Challenges on the Way to Efficient Multi-Project Resource Management

Challenge 1: Analyzing your resources.

One of the biggest challenges of multi-project resource management from the start is analyzing and understanding your resources clearly: people, facilities, and equipment. When you have a global resource pool and people with different specialties, skills, competencies, and attributes, collecting and processing all this information is quite difficult but it’s a must for your business if your goal is effective multi-project resource management.

Challenge 2: Building a resource pool and standardizing it.

One should distinguish between local and global levels. Thus, on the local level, team leaders or the teams themselves take care of all these things and have a clear picture of their people’s attributes and other characteristics. On the higher level, there’s the need to pull the entire resource pool together and standardize it, in other words, create a single source of truth for everyone in the company regardless of their location. This also sounds quite challenging, but it’s another must to bring your project management to the next level.

Challenge 3: Understanding the supply and bridging it with the demand.

Once you understand what your supply looks like in terms of what we've got available, the next step is understanding the demand. What kind of demand is coming from internal stakeholders, like project managers? What exactly do they expect the entire resource pool to deliver in this fast-paced, multi-project environment? Investing in high-quality project plans to truly understand what needs to be done at the right level of detail is critical.

The role of a resource management software solution in overcoming these challenges.

The above-described three steps are essential to ensure smooth workflow in your organization and make the best of your resources, but at the same time, you should keep in mind that effective multi-project resource management is impossible without the software solution's help. A human brain cannot collect and process data of 100+ resources, let alone the bigger resource pools with, for example, 5000+ employees.

These challenges look scary at first glance, but you need to put this effort once to embrace brilliant results afterwards. Once you input all the data of your resources and projects in the system, the software solution will do the biggest part of the work itself letting you enjoy the desired outcomes, e.g., effective competence management; building a bridge between supply and demand; prediction of employee’s workload and preventing overload. It will help you streamline all resource management processes, including allocating resources, analyzing their performance, and improving their productivity.