Resource management - Oxford Brookes University

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
For project and business success
What is Resource Management?
Resource Management helps project and resource managers create plans, request staffing for projects and assign people to specific tasks. It is key to project and business success.
In IT Services we use resource management to ensure that we are allocating tasks and workloads to our teams effectively and use time cards to plan staff time spent on all ITS activities.
The aim is to achieve an accurate, real-time view, of resource availability for projects and Business as Usual (BAU), which will allow each department to:

ensure that colleagues don’t get over-committed

capture the real duration and cost of project and business-as-usual activities

improve our forecasting of the time required to complete tasks and projects

understand where a department is resource-challenged.

Please note: time logged not against specific tasks (eg 'email', 'meeting' or 'documentation') are captured by the 'General' category. The pie chart illustrates time recorded for October 2017.

Project Managers and team leaders
Resource plans are an effective way of capturing the key elements for requesting and allocating colleagues time and tracking their effort/cost. Requesters can create resource plans that specify a team or an individual required for project tasks. A resource manager/team leader can then view their availability and make allocations based on team or individual availability.
Resource reporting
Reports provide resource requesters and team leaders with visibility of resource allocations, availability and utilisation.
Diagram 1 below illustrates the availability of a colleague or team per month, in hours. Any shade of green suggests some availability, if amber or red, the resource in question has limited or no availability.

Diagram 2 below illustrates the forecasting of resource availability by individual or team, per month in percentages. As you can see some amber suggests possible over commitment in places.

Diagram 3 below illustrates a particular project report, identifying how much time that project has taken for the two colleagues involved. During November, the project took up 38% and 72% respectively and into December the time spent reduces.