The Definitive Guide to Resource Scheduling and Planning

10 min readFeb 12, 2021

Please note: this post originally appeared on the saviom.

Introduction
Resources are the most significant investment for most businesses. A business must utilize its resources most efficiently and intelligently when facing a highly competitive and volatile global market.

Many project-intensive businesses use either silos of spreadsheets or some home-grown tools for scheduling and planning their resources. These solutions are incredibly limiting, time-consuming, and hard to maintain. It creates double bookings, over/underutilized resources, undesirable hiring/firing, low staff morale, improper planning of pipeline projects, etc.

To achieve your limited resources’ full potential, a business must establish an enterprise-level matured resource scheduling and planning process.
This guide has been designed for businesses to get a comprehensive understanding of resource scheduling and planning systems. So that a business can establish the right processes with the right tool.

#1. What Is Resource Planning and Scheduling?

Defining Resource Planning

Resource Planning is the method of planning and utilizing various types of business resources effectively and efficiently across the enterprise. These resources can be workforce, assets, facilities, equipment, etc.

Defining Resource Scheduling and Resource Allocation

Resource scheduling is the most crucial part of the resource planning process. It involves identifying and allocating resources for a specific period to various types of activities. These are related to project work or non-project work i.e., like BAU, Support, admin, operation, etc.

Resource allocation is the other word for resource scheduling. In short, resource allocation identifies and allocates resources to the projects at a high level.

One must avoid the “first visible first fit” approach instead of the “best visible best fit” principle for resource allocation.

Read More
The 5 Best Methods Of Successful Resource Allocation

#2. What Are the Benefits of Resource Scheduling and Planning Solution?

An effective workforce scheduling and planning system can resolve several challenges faced by modern businesses with the matrix organization. It will provide immense benefits in the following areas:

Gain visibility of all your resource or workforce demand across the enterprise

The system can achieve 360-degree visibility into all work demand types, be it project, non-project, BAU/admin, and vacations. It also highlights this information across verticals of geography, functions, domains, and business units.

Deploy competent person at the right time and cost

Having the right person with the right skills is crucial for a project to finish within budgeted time and cost. Resource scheduling methodology can identify and allocate a competent person. It can be based on their skills, experience, qualifications, location, team, cost rate, and any other criteria you prefer. In the absence of such a capability, the organization will land up with a large bench of mismatched skillset.

Forecast shortfall/excess of resources and take corrective actions

The system can forecast resource demand for every type of project and non-project work to Identify shortfall/excesses of resources. You can adjust project timelines, retrain current employees, or hire a contingent workforce ahead of the time.

Maximize utilization of workforce on billable and strategic projects

The system can forecast billable and strategic utilization of the workforce ahead of time. So that you can mobilize employees from non-billable or low priority work to billable or high priority projects.

Billable utilization is a critical KPI for a professional service business to ensure profitability and sustainability.

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Maximize Profitable Resource Utilization with Modern Resource Management Software

Control project cost ahead of time by forecasting project financials

The system can track critical financial indicators for a project like resourcing cost, revenue, profit margins, and overheads. It can help you take corrective action and control project costs ahead of time. It will help you to control Band Mix for a typical IT services organization.

#3. What Resource Scheduling and Planning Techniques Are Currently Used?

Most of the project-centric businesses are fighting against resource management challenges of the 2020s with the systems developed in the 1990s.
It is valid for all types of companies irrespective of the size or market share or market reputation. The tools listed below are some examples of legacy systems:

Silos of spreadsheets built with macros
Home-grown half-baked systems
Windows-based systems of the 1990s
Entry-level resource scheduling software

Most of these outdated legacy tools have the following challenges: –

Easy to develop but difficult to maintain
Paying high price for lost market opportunities
Unable to provide forecasting and capacity planning
Not designed for improving profitable utilization & cost reduction
Unsuitable for matrixed organization structure
Unable to deliver real-time business intelligence

#4. Best Practices for Efficient Resource Scheduling and Planning Solution.

Resource scheduling is not only about plugging the hole by scheduling or allocating resources against the projects. It goes much beyond this process. A comprehensive resource scheduling and planning solution includes enterprise-wide resource scheduling, forecasting, capacity planning, utilization management, tracking actuals, etc.

Enterprise resource or workforce scheduling

The system should provide a single schedule for the whole enterprise to establish a single source of truth. For example,

Scheduling or allocation can be done in real-time by multiple stakeholders
Agile resource allocation can be achieved with easy drag and drop
Schedule can be viewed in numerous ways in a matrix organization structure
Ensure there is no double booking

Management of matrix organization structure

Most of the large organizations have now moved into a matrix reporting structure that has multiple dimensions. The resource planning system provides visibility of people’s information across the complex matrix organization structure and controls the rights to modify them. It ensures that no resource falls through the cracks.

Competency tracking and allocating right people

It is critical to keep competency information up to date. The right people are assigned to the right project across the enterprise based on skill, experience, qualifications, location, cost rate, etc. This information can be updated by the concerned user, which can be validated before accepting it.

Read More
Resources and Capabilities Analysis: The Human Resource Perspective

Forecast workforce utilization

The system should provide short- or long-term forecasting of billable, strategic, and overall workforce utilization. So that the corrective actions can be taken to protect the effective utilization and profitability of your business. As a result, the stakeholders managing different dimensions can foresee the information required to make the right decisions.

Resources capacity planning

The system should forecast capacity vs. demand from multiple perspectives i.e., by role, department, team, location, skills, etc. It helps you identify short or long-term shortage/excess of resources ahead of time and reduce undesirable hiring/firing decisions.

Project pipeline management

The system should keep track of future project requirements to ensure that your resource pool is optimally balanced and skilled. It will also make it ready to meet the demand of projects in the opportunity pipeline or approval pipeline. It will help in planning hiring or training related decisions ahead of time.

Read More
Beating Market Volatility with Efficient Resource Capacity Planning

Tracking actuals against forecast

The system should help you keep track of actual time spent against the estimates. So that future forecasting can be improved and aligned to reality. It will also help you monitoring shared resources who are working on multiple activities.

#5. How Resource Scheduling and Planning Can Improve Profitability & Productivity

Resources scheduling and planning can help a business unleash human resources’ full potential and significantly improve profitability and productivity.

Improve profitable utilization

A business can improve profitability by implementing strategic and billable utilization across the enterprise using effective resource management. As a result, valuable and critical resources do not get assigned to the lesser important projects or activities.

Reduce resourcing cost

With the help of efficient resource management, overall resourcing cost can be reduced drastically:

Eliminate under/over skilled resources on projects
Utilize cost-effective global resources without compromising quality
Avoid last-minute hiring cost thru with proper capacity planning
Reduce unplanned attrition

Read More
Reduce Resourcing Cost by 10–30% with Modern Resource Management Software

Reduce hiring/firing cost

Hiring/ firing costs can be reduced by using workforce forecasting and capacity planning. Forecasting enables proactive smoothening of project workload and reskilling employees. Frequent Hiring/Firing creates a negative image for the organization for attracting new talents. It is also an expensive exercise and affects the existing employees’ morale.

Improve workforce productivity

Resource management can improve employee productivity significantly:

Employees having work allocated as per their competencies and area of interest
Employees being able to work on different types of projects across the business
Employees being reskilled to bridge future resource capacity gaps
Employees being empowered in the early decision-making process

#6. How to Choose the Right Tool for Efficient Resource Scheduling and Planning

Resource scheduling and planning is crucial for the performance improvement of modern business. So, a business should not just look for a solution that just replaces the current spreadsheet functionalities. It should go much beyond that and ensure that they have a solution that can provide the following:

Forecasts and improves profitability and productivity

Resource management solution should not only be doing scheduling, but it should also help your business to do multi-dimensional forecasting. It also provides real-time business intelligence to improve business performance, profitability, and productivity.

Read More
10 Reasons Why Resource Scheduling and Management is Crucial for a Business to Win in 2020s

Scalable, configurable, and expandable

Every business is different, so their resource management needs. You can’t have one size fits all. That is why a business should select a scalable, configurable, and expandable tool to meet future business needs.

Resolve complexities of matrix organization structure

Nowadays, most businesses have established a matrix organization structure to achieve the best utilization of their workforce. So, it is critical for a business to have a software system that aligns with its matrix organization structure.

Real-time BI: reports, analytics, and dashboards

Resource demand in a real-life business environment changes every minute. So, it is crucial for a resource management software to get real-time business intelligence i.e., reports, analytics, and dashboards.

Integrations

Most businesses have already invested in enterprise-level systems holding quite a bit of data required by a resource management system. This specific information can be a resource profile, competencies project detail, etc. So, the resource management system must integrate seamlessly with existing systems.

#7. Resource Scheduling and Planning Techniques and Tips

Following are different techniques and tips for efficient scheduling and planning both human and non-human resources.

Smart Allocation

Smart allocation is critical for an organization to get the best value out of the scarce resources. It includes:

Enable enterprise wide visibility of everyone’s capacity, competency, availability etc.
Establish multidimensional view for each stakeholder e.g. project-centric view for Project managers, resource-centric view for resource managers, location-centric view for global manager etc.
Get 360-degree view of every type of work done by an individual related to the project, non-project, vacation, training activity etc.
Allocate right resource to the right project at the right time

Resource Forecasting

In dynamically changing resource demand scenario, it is critical to have powerful foresight into various aspects of the resource management.

Gain real-time and multi-dimensional viewing of various types of the forecast
Cater to specific forecasting needs of various stakeholders in a matrix structure
Enable short-term, medium-term and long-term forecasting
Be able to plan pipeline projects for most probable opportunities

Resource Optimization

Resource optimization is critical to get efficient usage and best value out of the enterprise resources. It involves:

Identify the right resource for the right project at the right time
Ensure that the resource is cost effective
Avoid over or under skilled person working on a job
Minimize over or under utilization of the resource

Resource Capacity Planning

Resource capacity planning is the process of forecasting the gap between the capacity and the demand. It involves:

Identify the shortfall or excesses of resources during different periods
Ensure that excess capacity is not wasted and utilized effectively
Take corrective actions ahead of time to overcome shortfall of resources

Resource Utilization

Resource utilization is the way to measure how effectively resources are utilized against their availability or capacity. It is important to ensure that:

Resources are optimally utilized for the productive activities
Critical resources are assigned to Billable or Strategic projects as a push to Non- billable activities
Low cost resources are assigned to Non-Billable or administrative work if possible

Resource Modelling and Simulation

What-if analysis is used to do modelling for various planning scenarios to get best outcome within existing resourcing constraints. This exercise involves:

Juggle around different project timelines based on the priorities
Put projects on hold if it is not immediately critical for the business
Analyze impact of the modelling on resource capacity, cost, utilization etc.
Determine the best possible scenario and apply it to the real plan

To know how SAVIOM can help you to do efficient resource scheduling and planning CLICK HERE

#8. The SAVIOM Solution

SAVIOM is the market leader in providing an Enterprise Resource Capacity Planning solution. With over 20 years of experience leading the market, Saviom is actively used by over 15 highly-esteemed global companies around the world. The tools within the suite include project portfolio management, professional service automation, and workforce planning software. Re-engineer operational efficiency with a system shaped around your business.