How Quickly Can You Complete Jigsaw Puzzles Of Resource Management?

Managing resources for a project or managing a company's resource pool is like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Whether in IT services or in the pharma sector, you keep solving these puzzles. Consider a few examples:

IT services

Say, you need to find a cybersecurity specialist with adjacent skills in digital forensics in a large pool of resources. Or, fulfilling a customer’s change request needs 10 Python coders for a couple of months sometime in the future. Or, you need to find skill-wise and competency-wise gaps in your resource pool across timelines in future.

Pharma industry drug NPD projects

You need experts in organic chemistry and pharmaceutical excipients to work together on sample preparation during a particular time slot in future. Later on, you will need someone with scaling up experience for transition from lab to production-scale.?

At the company level, you need to assess your talent sufficiency for your planned new product portfolio.

Such puzzles confront you every now and then.

But how quickly (and how well) do you solve the puzzles?

You can act on resources only after completing the above kind of puzzles. If you take too long, the puzzles' pieces (resources) would get scattered due to change in circumstances. That would be wasteful.

You must complete your resources’ puzzles quickly to be actionable.??

The demand-supply equation

Non-availability of the right resources at the right time can be a serious problem.?

In IT services, a lack of resources can result in revenue loss in customer projects. On the other hand, undeployed bench strength drains the profits.?

In pharmaceutical companies developing new products, resource constraints can delay projects, pushing back launch dates and affecting revenue forecasts. For example, if a product launch planned for December 2028 is delayed to the second quarter of 2029 due to resource shortages in 2026, the company loses potential revenue for those intervening months.

Not completing resource jigsaw puzzles quickly has a significant financial impact on companies.

Balancing the demand-supply equation

To address the above challenges, companies must focus on matching resource supply with demand in real-time. While determining supply based on the number of people available and their capacity is relatively straightforward, calculating demand is more complex.

In IT services, demand is derived from resource loading plans for each project. These plans must be carefully created and regularly updated to reflect changes - for example, when a customer requests additional resources or reduces their requirements.

In pharma product development, the demand is dynamic. As project timelines shift, resource allocation needs changes. For instance, if a predecessor activity is delayed, the resources planned for subsequent tasks may not be needed on their originally scheduled dates. This requires tight integration between resource demand and project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) planning.

Resource management is a critical success factor in internal projects and customer projects.

Shortage of resources can lead to significant financial losses. For efficient and timely resource management, companies need to do the following well:

1. Forecast resource gaps proactively to address potential shortfalls.

2. Integrate resource demand into the WBS, allowing for dynamic adjustments as project timelines shift.

3. Capture capacity and demand at a granular level, considering skills and competencies rather than just headcount or hours.

Matching available capacity with demand based on total hours or full-time equivalents (FTE) isn’t enough. For example, having 160 hours of Java programming capacity doesn't help if a project requires Python skills.

Match supply for skill-hours with demand for the same skill-hours.

You need? granular information of skill-hours that your talent pool has. You need a loading plan of your resources in the same granular detail.

?1. Such a loading plan helps identify skill-gaps in the organization.

?2. You make correct hiring decisions and launch well-targeted upskilling initiatives.

?3. It improves overall resource utilization and project success rates.

The resources’ jigsaw puzzles get scattered due to changes in circumstances.

You need dynamic resource management that takes into account changes in resource demand.

In IT services, you need to analyze your deals pipeline.?

In the IT and pharma sectors you must conduct portfolio analysis of external and internal projects periodically to prepare reliable demand forecasts.

You also need to take into account employee, leaves, recruitment, and separations.

Resource management has a much wider impact.

In IT services, efficient resource management improves project profitability, CSAT scores, raises billable utilization of resources, improves billing accuracy, reduces DSOs, and prevents employee attrition.

In pharma NPD projects, effective resource management accelerates time-to-market, improves ROI, and enhances regulatory approval success rate.

Advanced professional services automation (PSA) software gives you all the above capabilities.

Legacy enterprise systems consisting of standalone CRM, HRMS, project management, and accounting systems aren't equipped for the above tasks. Managers therefore rely on spreadsheets and emails to pull and process data from multiple sources.They spend considerable time in reconciling such data.?

PSA software is designed to eliminate such manual, error-prone, and time-consuming practices. It interfaces with your existing systems, pulls and combines data as needed, and presents to managers in actionable ways.

PSA software provides you tools?

-to build a granular skills inventory,?

-to connect WBS and tasks to skill-hours needed,?

-to factor in future projects’ needs,?

-to spot talent gaps, and?

-to plan recruitment and training actions.?

More on resource management

Data-backed Skills Management: Launchpad To Achieve Business Goals

PSA? lets you find the best fit of resources for various tasks. It lets you work out various scenarios of resource allocations and achieve optimum balance of time and costs.

Kytes, a powerful PSA, provides dynamic and granular resource management that goes beyond headcount calculations. Kytes helps you achieve competitiveness and financial goals in project-based industries IT services and pharmaceutical NPD projects.

Contact us at [email protected] for a demo and more information.