Resource management: a practical guide for NSEs and consulting firms
Agathe Placet
Content manager
May 16, 2023
5 min
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Since the heart of your business consists in offering high added value services to your customers, your ability to manage the resources at the base of these services as effectively as possible, in other words to optimize your resource management, becomes one of the key success factors for your business.
At the mention of the term Ressource Management, the first association that comes to the head of the average person is probably the one leading to collaborators. The human resource is in fact a central and critical element in ESN, a company whose very nature is to provide its customers with intelligence, analysis, and interpersonal skills, to use the words of Yoann Le Gall when he worked as HR Development Manager for DevoteamRevolve.
But now more than ever, the reality of Ressource Management is, as you can imagine, much more complex than the linear management of the men and women working for your organization every day.
At the time when your consulting firm or ESN (digital services company) is no longer simply a means of subsistence for its employees but becomes a guarantor of their development, also at a time when the intellectual contribution of your experts is Challenged by the machine and the algorithms, thereby makingartificial intelligence One of the resources that you must know how to manage, your ability to manage your resources effectively has a more decisive weight than ever in the success or not of your company.
Beyond these considerations, which may seem abstract, there are very down-to-earth benefits arising from optimal resource management, starting with a much better capacity for your firm, to reduce its costs, to improve its efficiency, to increase its productivity... in short, to be more profitable.
But let's not rush and get back to the essence of this guide and why we built it for you.
Our conviction, within Napta, is that achieving the best resource management possible should be the business of everyone in your teams and not only that of the human resources department or financial management. Nor should it be the preserve of Top management at the risk of being uncorrelated with the execution of missions in the field.
This guide therefore aims to answer the most important questions you have on this central theme that is Ressource Management in the most concrete way possible, taking into account the different levels of your organization.
Let's start at the beginning: understand what resource management is and especially what it means in a service company like yours?
A consulting firm or an IT service provider is particular that everything is a question of balance, even more so than in other types of businesses such as SaaS (Software as a Service).
You must ensure a balance between the volume of customer projects and that of available collaborators, between the technical skills present within the company and those to be recruited, between the latter and your forecasts of New Business ...
All of these considerations serve to answer one question: how avoid over-availability or under-availability of the resources necessary to meet current customer needs but also those to come, at least in the short term.
And that's where the Resource management.
If we had to provide a practical definition of what resource management is in the context of a consulting firm or an ESN, it would be the practice that allows you to plan, schedule, and assign the right resources to the right customer projects at the right time, keeping in mind that these same resources are likely required elsewhere in your business.
Who says “resources” obviously says “collaborators” and the multiple criteria that must be taken into account to decide on their assignment (skills, availability, mission wishes, training desires, etc.). But it goes without saying that your Ressource Management goes far beyond managing your consultants and also includes technological and even methodological tools that you deploy to your customers.
In addition to these internal parameters, there are elements that are intrinsically linked to missions, making your resource management even more complex.
Gartner In 2019, the need for”move from a static planning approach to an agile approach, which allows staff to be continuously redeployed in order to adapt to changing business needs and required skills.”
So what is this agile resource management?
It consists of 5 phases during which information flows from top to bottom and from bottom to top within your company, each phase serving to feed the next and the previous one in a continuous objective of improvement.
This is the starting point for Ressource Management, the stage at which you must identify the resources available to you, whether they are human, technological or financial.
The term “available” is important. This means that resources must be mobilized when the project requires them. The focus is therefore on needful fluidity of information from your consultants in the field to your managers, for example, communicating to them any need to extend or shorten a mission.
Once identified, these resources are assigned to your client projects for a fixed period of time after which the resources, unless the program changes, become available again.
Note that, although we always talk about the allocation of resources to your client missions, you may decide to allocate your resources to non-billable tasks or even to internal missions such as the design of a tailor-made CRM for your firm.
The objective of this phase is to maximize the use of your company's resources as much as possible.
The challenge here is threefold and aims to answer these 3 questions:
Now that you have identified the available resources, assigned them to the right missions or tasks, then verified their level of use, or even reallocated them during step 2 of the Ressource Management, you have enough data to allow you to anticipate future levels of use for missions of the same type.
The forecasting and planning phase is for you allow you to anticipate your resource needs and more specifically the collaborators you are missing within your teams to fulfill future customer missions.
In other words, this stage already puts you in a position to be able to plan your recruitments with confidence. When you know that in a little over 10 years, The recruitment tensions in the NSEs have seen their value increase by 4 to 8 times and all sectors combined, have Process And oftools allowing you to masterfully manage your resource management, and therefore to anticipate your recruitments, is certainly not a luxury.
This foresight also extends to the use of your employees with the main objective of limit your intercontract rate. At the end of this phase, your teams are therefore in a position to bridge the gap between your resources, whether available and unused or to be recruited, and the demand for skills.
Thanks to Real-time data feedback, this reporting stage should allow you to closely monitor the indicators associated with the workload of your teams, starting with the profitability of the resources mobilized.
If you want to really leverage this reporting phase and for it to help you make informed decisions, which is its final goal, it is crucial that the analysis goes beyond the company and your teams and also focuses on the individual performance of your consultants.
As each company is unique, it is possible that monitoring the performance of your consulting firm or your ESN requires reports specific to your organization. So it may make sense to connect, at this reporting stage, your own BI tools (Business Intelligence) to your Software of Ressource Management.
However, let us not fool ourselves. Setting up such a structured and streamlined approach to managing your resources is not an easy task and will undoubtedly be Faced with its share of internal frictions.
But the good news is that, in the daily life of your practice or your ESN, resource management organized will have very concrete effects on the daily life of your employees and it is probably around these operational benefits that you will need to mobilize and motivate your teams.
The benefits of optimized resource management extend to your company, your customer and of course to your employees.
On the business side, the Process of Ressource Management described a little bit above allows you to:
As for your customers, they also benefit from your optimized resource management by receiving, from your managers, realistic budget and deadline proposals thus allowing them to better organize themselves internally.
This is once again made possible thanks to a perfect perception of workloads, schedules, priorities and budgets by your teams.
Finally, on the employee side, the latter will also have something for themselves, the main benefit being clearly greater satisfaction at work.
By avoiding their overuse, you avoid creating frustration among your employees otherwise forced to work on too many projects and thus finding themselves in difficulty in terms of deadline and quality of work delivered.
By limiting their under-use, you save yourself a real loss of motivation, with periods of intermission being neither the most motivating nor the most productive for consultants.
Thoughtful and organized resource management thus also plays a role in Feeling valued by your employees, now in a position to work on projects requiring the skills they master or even those they want to develop.
In practice, manage this mass of data coming from the field but also from your various customers require specialized tools in Ressource Management. What types of features can you expect from these tools? The answer is right after.
The increasing complexity of Ressource Management combined with its crucial role in service businesses mean that you will not be able to avoid a dedicated tool if you really want to structure and streamline the management of resources within your company.
Based on this observation, you have two options:
The first option has the undeniable advantage of offering you a tool that perfectly fits the contours of your organization, its objectives and its constraints. However, make sure that you have sufficient human and technological resources in-house to carry out the project to the end, at the risk of ending up with an improved Excel file as a tool for Ressource Management.
Opting for a resource management solution can on the other hand generate certain frustrations within your teams. Each company having its own Use Cases, your employees may fear that they will ultimately have to perform part of the management of resources by hand, as the software does not fully cover the specificities of your missions.
But practice reveals that with all the settings available in such tools, they actually cover almost all resource management needs, in addition to being a more economical and directly operational solution.
In terms of functionalities, the tool of your choice should, in our opinion, meet four major missions.
It should allow you to be able to gather all of your planning data, those concerning your employees but also information relating to missions and projects. Objective: to inform your decisions as much as possible.
It may therefore be useful to be able to connect external tools such as your CRM to your solution of Ressource Management. Thanks to this centralization, you will be able to cross the criteria of each project with the availability, skills and interests of your employees. This results in the most relevant consultants to carry out this or that mission.
Your resource management solution should of course also allow you to be able to manage and monitor your projects. With the multiplication of projects, it will be useful for you to instantly visualize which mission is at which stage but also to be notified when there is a gap between planning and execution.
As your consultants are at the center of your business,The resource management tool of your choice must Tell you about their skills, their levels of expertise Just like their aspirations In terms of training and type of mission.
Finally, you need to be able to precisely monitor the evolution of indicators related to the load of your teams, whether it is the overall load or the individual burden of each employee. So you will be able to determine whether budgets are respected or not and monitor the level of profitability of your office or your ESN.
With the resource management, No more random resource allocation. You are now in a position to effectively plan and manage all of your resources, whether human or technological.
Also no more accepting all the projects arriving at your salespeople's desk. Your scheduling software And your Process of resource management now put you in a position to determine the missions that were the most profitable for you in the past as well as those for which you already have internal skills or the projects that interest your employees.
The real-time transmission of data on your employees and projects, from the field to planning and management and vice versa, allows you both to be able to correct the situation for off-budget missions but also to anticipate, especially in terms of recruitment.
And all this is made possible thanks to an approach of Ressource Management for and by all.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our Infographic “Management of staffing: 5 methods of organization”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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