Maximizing Workforce Visibility With A Resource Management Solution

Posted by: lukwago J in Life Style January 4, 2023

Workforce visibility refers to providing the data on employees’ competences and their levels, previous experience, the data on people’s locations as well as their performance. In the present-day business environment, where a company’s employees can be scattered all over the globe and/or hundreds of people can work on delivering dozens of concurrent projects, this data gains an unprecedented importance. In particular, project and resource managers as well as HR specialists can gain valuable insights from this kind of data. In particular, it allows them to:

find the right resources to complete project tasks;
identify the needs for upskilling and/or reskilling;
track employees’ performance, and more.

However, to ensure workforce visibility, huge amounts of workforce data need to be stored and processed properly. This is where a resource management solution comes in handy.

Read further to find out how RM software can maximize resource visibility and why it is important for the efficient resource management process.

How does resource management software increase workforce visibility?

Before we examine the ways an RM solution can increase visibility of your resources, let’s take a look at its essential resource management functionality. The solution should be capable of:

Providing information on each employee’s competences, their levels, and capacity;
Suggesting options for maximum efficient resource allocation based on employees’ skills, availability, and capacity;
Facilitating collaboration between siloed and distributed teams;
Providing access to real-time and historical data to track progress and overall performance;
Forecasting resource bottlenecks;
Keeping track of people’s workload;
Integration opportunities (e.g., with human resource management systems).

Notably, all of the above-mentioned capabilities are available in Epicflow – an AI-powered resource management solution designed for work in a multi-project environment. Its functionality allows you to use it for a variety of project and resource management purposes – from efficient group management to seamless orchestration of multiple projects.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how an RM solution’s capabilities can maximize workforce visibility.

Providing insight into people’s competences

A resource management software provides enterprise-wide visibility of employees’ competences and their levels as well as opportunities to interact with this data (add/delete competences, adjust their levels, associate them with team members and project tasks in the system). When managing large complex projects where a lot of people are involved or a multi-project environment with shared resources, the visibility of this data is essential, and here is why:

it’s the basis for efficient resource allocation – i.e., ensuring that the right people work on the right tasks;
it’s required for detecting employees’ skill gaps and facilitating their professional development (in collaboration with the HR department);
it helps utilize available resources more efficiently: e.g., when an employee from one resource group has no capacity to complete a project task, having a competence management system at hand will allow a project manager to quickly find a person with necessary skills from the other group.

Advanced resource management solutions like Epicflow can use this data along with people’s availability and capacity to suggest optimum resource allocation variants.

Presenting resource performance data

A resource management solution provides a project manager with the historical and real-time data on resource performance. In particular, it presents the output the team members have produced and how much work is left to be completed – it allows a project manager to assess their productivity. Advanced RM software can provide insight into the output produced in relation to employees’ capacity, which makes it possible to immediately detect resource bottlenecks and use these insights to avoid issues in the future.

Providing visibility of resource performance data is extremely important, as it’s one of the primary indicators of a project environment’s health. The state of projects in the environment is a reflection of what has been going on at the resource level. Therefore, tracking performance at the resource level allows a project
manager to timely detect any resource-related issues before they cause problems for the project level.

Allowing for viewing and analyzing employee’s capacity

As a rule, resource management solutions provide visibility of employees’ capacity. RM software with predictive capabilities like Epicflow can also forecast capacity in the future.

Why are capacity visibility and analysis important?

First, they’re the basis for efficient resource allocation (along with the data on people’s competences and availability).
Second, a resource manager can use this data to identify the gap between resource demand and available capacity for upcoming projects, find the ways to bridge them if necessary and in such a way ensure that future initiatives will be staffed with required people.
Third, capacity visibility and analysis contribute to the optimization of people’s workload, which in turn is the prerequisite of high productivity: as a rule, employees who work at their full capacity but at the same time aren’t overwhelmed show higher efficiency.

Conclusion

Let’s summarize the key points of the article.

Workforce visibility gives an understanding of employees’ competences, experience, performance, and locations. Visibility of this data is essential for project and resource managers, team leaders, and HR specialists.
A resource management solution can provide visibility of the following kinds of data:

it presents the data on employees’ competences, which can be used in the resource allocation process and for identifying employees’ skill gaps if any;

resource performance tracking makes it possible to assess people’s productivity; regular analysis of this data allows a project manager to assess the workflow’s health;
viewing and analyzing employees’ capacity plays an important role in resource allocation, capacity planning, and workload optimization.

Therefore, leveraging a resource management solution is an effective way to maximize workforce visibility.

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