Resource Management Plan: Guide to Best Practices

Creating a resource management plan can take your agency’s efficiency to the next level.

However, managing your resources can be complex if you don’t know where to start. Resource managers must identify availability, spot potential resource gaps, correctly forecast demand, and balance resources accordingly. Now picture doing this across multiple projects.

In this article, we’ll explain this process with a step-by-step guide and top tips and tricks for effective resource planning.

The resource management plan can be described as a comprehensive document that contains information on your employees, their schedules, and project timelines. It also usually provides project financial information, such as your budget status and profitability.

Project management for agencies can be challenging, as it involves collaboration between cross-functional teams and balancing agency capabilities with client needs and requirements. In fact, according to research by PMI, 37% of strategic initiatives fail because of a lack of clearly defined processes to manage progress.

The ultimate purpose of the resource management plan is to provide you with this crucial oversight, so you can ensure timely adjustments and reallocation if necessary.

What should your resource plan tell you about your project and agency resources?

In the 2023 Agency Insights Report by Vendasta Agency, agency professionals named the following as their top pain points:

An effective resource management plan can help address all of the above and more, such as:

Effective resource management improves an agency’s ability to identify and mitigate risks. By ensuring optimal resource allocation and creating contingencies, companies can avoid project delays, cost overruns, and overutilizing staff, leading to more predictable and successful project outcomes.

Reliable needs forecasting enables agencies to anticipate resource requirements accurately and prevent resource shortages before they happen. As a proactive approach, it guarantees that projects are adequately staffed and allows for better strategic planning and enhanced budget control.

Balancing employee workloads through effective resource management prevents burnout and underutilization. By evenly distributing responsibilities, employees experience less stress, one of the leading causes of voluntary turnover. This approach to allocation can also increase engagement and productivity, as team members feel adequately challenged and utilized.

The specific process of putting together a resource management plan template can differ significantly depending on what type of software you’re using.

Research by The Wow Company states that agencies that use spreadsheets to manage projects have an average rate of 66% utilization for non-director roles. When switching to software, the utilization rate increases by almost 10%.

How does your resource planning benefit from switching from spreadsheet to software?

In the next section, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide for effective management plans with Productive, the all-in-one tool for agency management.

Creating a project management plan is similar to the overarching resource management planning process. It includes having a clear picture of your current resources or the resource identification process. For agencies, these are human resources (check out our strategies on human resource planning) and financial resources.

For human resources, you want to know who will be working on the project and for how many hours. For financial resources, you’ll need to define what the project needs to look like to be a success not only for the client but also for your agency.

In short, you’ll need to align your agency’s goals with the project goals.

Then, you’ll need to be able to visualize and organize these various types of resources, manage potential disruptions, and track performance.

Productive simplifies the creation of bookings by helping you access key employee data in one place. This includes information on who your employees are, their availability, and their cost rates.

When creating a resource booking, you’ll be able to review this information, including the overall amount of hours already scheduled across the services you’re providing (such as design, development, or marketing).

Time off management is a key part of availability — your employees can request leave on the platform and have it appear in the resource plan when approved. Additionally, a project manager can input it directly as a booking. Specific time off categories can be added to the platform and allocated to individuals.

Another great feature for easier visualizations are heatmaps or capacity indicators. These are color-coded representations of resource availability, which helps balance your employee workloads.

Project disruptions can be internal or external. It can include everything from an employee going on sudden sick leave, or clients requesting additions to the project scope. Handling both of these types of situations and more is a critical step in resource management for client projects.

How can you support your monitoring and adjustment mechanisms?

Investing in a resource management tool can be an answer in of itself. For example, when reallocating employees or shifting deadlines, instead of manually moving all task dependencies, your tool can do this for you automatically. As an example, Productive also lets you edit multiple bookings at the same time, or set repeated bookings for project team members with consistent schedules.

Another key factor in controlling risk is having effective communication. The benefits of using a single platform for your resourcing is that all of your key data is easily accessible.

With the new Permission Builder feature by Productive, you can control who can see and do what on the platform. This helps you promote transparency while still safeguarding sensitive information.

Another essential part of managing resource planning challenges is being able to view the impact certain changes have on your key capacity metrics. According to research by SoDa & Productive:

Source: 2022 Global Agency Landscape Report

With Productive, you can schedule resources and then check the impact this has on your:

When you reallocate your employees, add or remove bookings, this is automatically reflected in your data. This can help you monitor your project performance more closely and make more informed decisions on the changes you can make while still keeping your project profitable.

Another essential metric tracked by Productive is your agency’s utilization rate, or the ratio of billable hours worked vs. available working hours. You can use this data to determine the efficiency of various departments or employees and pinpoint potential problems. Additionally, you can forecast utilization to guide strategic decisions, such as hiring or reskilling.

If you want a first-hand look at a resource plan created for client projects, check out the live demo for Productive’s resource planning module. Here you can check everything from how to create a booking and manage time off requests to budgeting insights and various other key resourcing reports.

Here’s a quick run-down of commonly used resource management techniques. Understanding these terms can help guide your approach to planning:

Resource management tools provide a centralized platform for tracking and managing resources across projects. They facilitate real-time visibility into availability, utilization, and finances, enabling managers to make informed decisions.

Book a demo today to discover how Productive can help you optimize your strategic planning and day-to-day operations.