How to Optimize Your Resource Utilization for Better Project Results
Learning how to utilize your resources effectively is one of the most underused superpowers in project management.
Contributing to higher quality projects produced more efficiently, with a budget used more effectively, improving how you use your resources is an easy and effective way to hit on project managers’ top priorities.
So, how do you make sure that you’re making the most of your resources? Here’s the end-to-end strategy you can use.
- Take note of your overall resource capacity
To develop the ultimate resource utilization strategy, you first must take note of what you have.
Which of your resources are available to use for this project? Are they available for some of the time, or the entire duration of the project?
Take note of these so that you know who – or what – you have available to assign to tasks and when.
- Make a complete list of tasks and deliverables
An essential step in creating your project plan, schedule and resource utilization strategy is to create a complete list of tasks that will amount to a completed project.
This will allow you to create your project plan, schedule and – crucially to this resource utilization strategy – tag tasks with your ideal resources. This ensures that the tasks are done by the individuals best suited to them.
- Assign ideal resources to tasks
Look at your task list and consider: who has the most relevant experience for the task? Who has a preference, skill and/or talent for this task? In cases where several people are required to work together, who of your team works together most efficiently?
Weigh up these options and assign your ideal resources to their best suited tasks. Though this may change based on the next steps, having your preferences lined up before making your project schedule makes it more likely that the right resources will be assigned to the right tasks.
- Align with your project schedule
Next, you need to create your project schedule.
Of course, you can’t build a schedule solely on your preference of resources. First, you need to consider task dependencies – a.k.a. the tasks that depend on others being completed before they can start – the priority of tasks and any deadlines for certain milestones. Read more about how you can create your project schedule.
However, any wiggle room past this point should allow your project schedule to be fine-tuned by your resource-task preference list.
- Check and reorganize
When everything in your task-resource project schedule is in place, it’s a good idea to check for any gaps in your schedule where resources are not being used.
You can use this as an opportunity to move things around until you’re confident you have a schedule that provides the best balance between efficiency and quality.
- Hire or extend if necessary
When there’s a lot of work and too few resources to carry it out, there are two ways to mend the problem.
- Hire or outsource resources to cope with the additional work
- Extend the project timeline so that you can complete the work with the resources you have
In essence, the choice is: time or money. You’ll want to talk this over with the client to see which option is best for them.
- Finalize
Take a last look at your project schedule to ensure you’re satisfied, especially considering any last-minute resource additions or alterations to the project timeline.
Then, you’re ready to get to work and efficiently create the best quality project for your client.