4 Keys to a People-Centric Resource Management Plan

By Matt Van Vleet and Kymberli Cassidy

As a people manager in a services business, resource management is key to ensuring our business and people thrive. Resource management is the process of how we plan, schedule, and allocate our various resources so we can complete the projects we’re responsible for.

While we prefer to not refer to people as “resources,” for the sole purpose of common terminology, we’ll refer to people as a resource in this blog. Of course, the term also refers to materials, equipment, budgets—as well as plans and processes.

Unlike other businesses where people aren’t the primary “resource” to plan, a services business must take a more human approach to resource management and planning. To fulfill our goals as an organization, we need to be able to support and fulfill our people’s goals for growth. Happy, fulfilled employees make it easy for us to deliver promises to our clients.

There are two parts to people-focused resource management in services businesses:

1. Making sure we have the right number of people available and staff on the right projects.

2. Ensuring our people have a career path and are being developed so they stay with us, grow, and help us fulfill our company’s mission.

To create a robust and effective resource management plan, we have to balance our people, our clients, and our company. And the key to balancing all of these is to focus on four things: forecasting, leveling, allocation, and utilization.

Forecasting

Forecasting is a critical piece of resource management. It’s the place where we look forward and get a picture of what is going to happen based on our data. While it’s interesting knowing what happened last month, effective forecasting is really about what’s happening in the next three to six, or even nine, months. It enables us to understand how our business is doing and is a stepping stone to predicting revenue and profit.

In order to plan and forecast our people, we need to know our sales forecast for upcoming projects as well as the demands of our current projects. When we do a good job at forecasting, we can look at our 30, 60, or 90 day forecast and have a better ability to drive the sales process and hiring decisions. It also helps us ensure our people stay busy, happy, and have things to work on, and continue fulfilling promises to our clients. Effective forecasting ultimately leads to effective resource utilization.

Resource Utilization

Resource utilization is about how we are going to efficiently utilize and manage our people over the next 30, 60, and 90 days. We want to ensure the people we have are being utilized at a percentage that keeps them busy and also keeps our projects delivered on time, yet aren’t over-allocated.

It’s important that we also build in time to take care of our people. Done right, we can also make time for our people to do things that help them grow, like training or conferences. When we are planful about both billable and non-billable utilization, we can easily and visibly see the health of the business too. The key is to not allow variables outside our control to be in charge of how we use our people.

Allocation

Allocation is about the details. It’s about creating a plan based on our people, our company, and our clients and then executing that plan. It’s largely about communication and doing everything necessary to ensure the on-the-ground work can start seamlessly. Once we understand our utilization, allocation can be executed from the forecasting we’ve done.

It’s more than, “Here’s a person to fill an open role.” It’s about allocating the right person to the right placement. Personality matters, background matters, and our people’s personal growth, goals, and interests matter. Then we need to communicate all of that to them as soon as possible after it's decided, let them know why we chose them, and how we see it can help them on their growth path.

At the client level, we need to communicate to the client who is allocated to them, info on their background, and why we chose them for that project. Then the client can understand who is coming in, what to expect from their background, and prepare to get the work started.

Leveling

Forecasting, utilization, and allocation are mostly about managing the business. Leveling is truly focused on people. Leveling can have negative connotations for many, but there’s actually a positive way to approach it. We see leveling as a means for developing people. When you help your people level up in the ways they want, you help your organization level up. You want your people to have what they need to reach their potential and goals.

If we aren’t growing our people, we aren’t growing our business. In services businesses, our people are the business. So, we can’t have them feeling stagnant and leaving because they’re unhappy because then our clients are not going to be happy. The more excited and passionate our people are about what they’re working on, the more value your client will get and be satisfied. And the better off the business will be with satisfied clients who keep coming back.

The Power of the Right Tools

These four key aspects of a people-centric resource management plan involve a lot of data pulled from a lot of areas of the business. That’s why the foundation for doing a great job at forecasting, allocation, utilization, and leveling, requires the exact right strategies and tools to empower the process. The trouble is that often companies use tooling and strategies that can, themselves, become a hindrance to the goal.

What works for a 10 person company is of course different from what larger companies need. But once we get past 15 people, for our resource management strategy to be effective, we need to be able to see all our data in one place. Having the right resource management tool can mean the difference between using our data to gain the insights we need to manage our resources effectively—and spending most of our time chasing after the data we need to make the right resource decisions.