6 strategies for resource utilisation and team productivity
There is an art to getting the most out of your team. An organisation that can nail its resource management has a crucial competitive advantage in the market. Optimum utilisation of resources helps strengthen organisational performance by improving productivity and achieving targets in the most efficient way possible.
Unlike tangible goods, employees have mental, physical and intellectual factors to consider. This means that to achieve effective utilisation of resources, we need to properly align skills, experience, availability and capabilities with current and upcoming projects. This requires full alignment between leadership, sales and project teams.
In this article, we will discuss how to improve utilisation - all with the goal of managing a highly efficient and productive team.
Creating a Resource Utilisation Plan
A resource management utilisation plan will help your firm put a structure in place to ensure you’re getting the most out of your team.
You may be running at full efficiency, or you might be looking for ways to improve your output. See the below steps to help you build out a resource utilisation plan and improve the output of your people.
1. Assess your resourcing as it stands
Do you have projects in the pipeline that exactly match the general competencies of your team? If not, then work with your sales and marketing teams to ensure that you grow this critical part of the business. If so, check the current utilisation rate of your employees and identify projects that crossover with their skills. Project management systems like Projectworks can help. Tools such as the 'resourcing by availability' report combined with the skills mapping filter will clearly show where and when you have the right resources available to get the work done.
2. Determine objectives
Set clear objectives for what you hope to achieve through resource optimisation. The obvious is to improve project margins, but given that service firms like yours rely on people, you could also consider: employee wellbeing, job satisfaction and other people-centric ideas that help with morale and indirectly contribute to team productivity.
3. Allocate resources
Based on the analysis of work processes and your objectives, allocate resources to ensure that employees are utilised effectively. This may involve redistributing tasks, assigning new projects, introducing new skill sets, or rearranging schedules. The key to being effective here is to clearly understand who is good at what and shuffle them around in a way that benefits all projects that you have on the go.
4. Evaluate and adjust
Continuously evaluate the utilisation of your employees and make adjustments to your resourcing plan as necessary. Focus on the ‘soft stuff’. Is your team assigned to work that is challenging enough for them to be engaged? Are there any clashes on the project team that need intervention? Have you overestimated the abilities of some team members? Or, is everything a perfectly optimised, well oiled machine? Get some data together, organise a team huddle and work out any pain points, bottlenecks and mismatches and make the appropriate adjustments.
5. Communicate with employees
Communication is key to ensuring that the resource utilisation plan is successful. If you prioritise one on ones with your employees you’ll start to get to know them in a way that’s far beyond the scope of what hard skills they have to offer. They could have information about what the gossip is around the office and give you a good gauge on the health of your culture, which could lead to a diagnosis that no data can show. You also get a chance to chat with them about their workloads, schedules, and responsibilities, and actively seek out honest feedback on their role in the business.
6. Monitor and report
Effective and efficient use of resources is an ongoing process. Utilisation reports are often built into project management systems, such as Projectwork's utilisation target report, which is a great way to measure the success of your resource utilisation plan.
Visibility is key when it comes to identifying and prioritising resource optimisation opportunities.
Having data stored in an integrated project management system can help speed up the accuracy and effectiveness of your plan.
Taking time to assess such metrics, and planning accordingly, is invaluable to resource optimisation efforts.
Measuring Resource Utilisation
Resource utilisation is a key indicator of organisational capacity, performance, and efficiency. Broadly speaking, to calculate utilisation you divide the number of hours worked by the number of hours available to an employee.
Other metrics become more specific, such as billable resource utilisation, which is a percentage of billable hours divided by total available hours. This figure highlights profitability and is commonly used as a general resource utilisation KPI. In Projectworks, this is represented with a delta that shows the discrepancy between hours resourced and hours actually worked.
Another resource utilisation metric is capacity utilisation rate, which measures a team's total utilisation rate. This is calculated by adding the utilisation rates of each resource and dividing by the number of employees in the organisation. Using a high-level metric like capacity utilisation can be used as a quick pulse-check for overall resource utilisation.
These metrics have something in common: they depend on accurate time tracking, historical data, and visibility across teams and projects. Using this data, it is possible to perform manual calculations, or you can use integrated project management systems like Projectworks to automate, customise, and report on live resource utilisation figures. The resourcing data is both backward-looking, using staff timesheets to accurately complete the reports, and forward-looking for planned work so that you can make educated resourcing decisions ahead of time. One key thing to remember when tracking and reporting on resource utilisation is to set accurate parameters and goals.
For example, Projectworks requires you to specify an employee's standard workweek capacity, with an option to set utilisation targets (used to indicate the amount of their workweek that is expected to be on billable projects). This provides project managers and business leaders with accurate, real-time utilisation rates at any given moment.
Improving Resource Utilisation
Business leaders face a number of challenges when it comes to optimising resource utilisation. By effectively pre-empting these challenges upfront, businesses can improve team morale, employee attrition and retention, and ultimately improve profitability.
One of the major hurdles of resource utilisation is skill mismatches. Teams may struggle to utilise their employees effectively if they don't have the right skills for the tasks at hand. This can lead to delays, decreased quality, and increased frustration.
A good way to tackle skill mismatches is to map the skills of your team and include them as part of their posting. For example, a developer may know several coding languages as well as being a good negotiator with leadership skills. Skills mapping provides a visual overview of the skills each employee has within a team and compares these with the skills required to complete tasks and projects. Any gaps identified can be remedied (either by hiring or upskilling) to improve utilisation rates.
Another common challenge is inadequate planning. A lack of planning will almost always result in low utilisation due to resources not being available at the right time, with the right skills. This can result in overloading employees with work, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. To plan ahead, sales and project teams can use forward-looking resourcing and match it to the upcoming sales and project pipelines. By working together, you can easily plan projects for deals that haven’t yet been won around the existing project pipeline. This will enable you to manage business and client expectations well in advance.
Tools like Projectworks (see image below) provide a platform from which teams can review past utilisation data, predict and forecast revenue, as well as being able to book in resources ahead of time.
A simple way to improve the accuracy of utilisation reporting is by embedding a culture of accurate and diligent timekeeping into the company culture. Using integrated project management systems can reduce barriers for employees to create better habits around timekeeping. Systems like Projectworks make timekeeping less onerous and even provide a timekeeping widget for employees to easily track time.
Conclusion
Resource utilisation is an integral part of managing any business, and optimum utilisation of resources can help the organisation reach its goals more quickly and efficiently. As a business leader or project manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the right people are assigned to the right tasks at the right times.
To do this, you need to have visibility into your team's utilisation and capacity, so that you can make informed decisions about resource allocation. With an integrated project management system like Projectworks, it’s easy to track and report on your team’s utilisation rate in order to achieve optimum utilisation of resources. This ensures that projects get completed on time and within budget, allowing the organisation to reach its goals efficiently and profitably.
To see Projectworks in action, click the button below to book a free trial.
