In order to successfully manage a project, you’ll need to understand what types of resources you’ll have at your disposal and determine how best to deploy them. That may sound pretty obvious and even simple, yet in practice, it can be anything but. In today’s business environment, it’s rare—if not unheard of—to find departments or teams focusing on just one or two tasks. It’s likely that the resources you’ll have working on your project are dividing their time and energy between multiple projects that are running simultaneous, but may or may not have anything to do with each other. Therefore, tracking and managing the resources you have working on your project becomes critical to its success.
Time tracking is much different today than it was 25 years ago. What used to be a matter of pushing people to work as hard as they could has (thankfully) evolved. Today, time tracking is all about understanding the amount of and type of work that needs to be completed, how long it “should” take to complete it, determining which areas need more resources, and figuring out who has the availability to help fill those needs—and when. And that last part is the key.
If you’ve accurately and consistently tracked time for all project resources, you’re well on your way to effective and proactive resource management. You’ll be able to quickly identify where the bottlenecks are occurring as well as where excess capacity exists within your resource pool. At that point, you’ll be able to shift resources around in such a way that the bottlenecks get the help they need without putting other areas of the projects at risk. And while this will help a given project run more smoothly, over the long term, rolling this information up from the project and department level to the organizational level can help HR and the business units develop hiring plans in a more strategic way.
In a changing environment, organizations of all types need to make the most of what they have available. While IT is often viewed as the epicenter (or hub) of project management, the benefits of proper time tracking and resource management can be beneficial throughout the entire organization.
Find out how you can take project and portfolio management beyond IT in your organization.