formerly FinancialForce
The services industry is booming, now dominating two-thirds of global commerce. For services leaders, this growth also implies more competition in securing and expanding market share.
With more competitors in the field, many services leaders are putting resource management optimization front and center in their growth strategy. By harnessing the strengths of their talent and retaining their best people, leaders aim to heighten customer outcomes and achieve cost-effective growth.
Resource management is the efficient and effective development of an organization’s resources (such as people, financials, and materials) to ensure availability and readiness when needed. “Development” here refers to the planning, allocation, optimization, and utilization of resources. Great resource management unlocks the power of your assets, creating more efficient staffing processes, stronger project teams, maximized margins, and higher customer and employee satisfaction.
In professional services, resource managers prioritize resource allocation—matching the right people with the right skills to the right tasks at the right time. Why? People are services businesses’ most valuable asset, and services are only as good as their talent. Thus, leaders must ensure their people—marketers, consultants, graphic artists, copywriters, etc.—have all the support they need from the organization to deliver top-notch output to customers.
To further distinguish between resource management and resource allocation—terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, here’s how they differ:
| Resource Management | Resource Allocation | |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Long-term process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources | Assigning resources to specific tasks or projects |
| Scope | Broad and includes many subsets, from planning to utilization | Narrow and focused on the initial assignment of resources |
| Goal | Achieve business goals by bringing out resources’ greatest organizational value | Assign the right resource to the right project at the right time |
| Duration | Long-term and ongoing | Short-term and focused |
People are the lifeblood of services businesses. Skills and expertise are their unique selling point, making people the biggest contributor to company revenue. Great resource management brings the best work out of employees without risking burnout, over- or underutilization, and employee dissatisfaction.
Outlined below are the benefits of optimizing resource management alongside the risks of failing to do so in professional services:
| Optimized Resource Management | Unoptimized Resource Management |
|---|---|
| Stronger teams due to data-driven staffing processes | Stunted productivity due to tasks and people mismatch |
| Engaged workforce, reduced over- and underutilization, better staff retention | Low morale due to burnout or lack of growth opportunities, fast employee churn |
| More resources available for high-value work due to streamlined operations | Backlogs, bottlenecks, and operational complexities due to misaligned resources |
| Higher customer satisfaction due to quality and timely services delivery | Bad customer experiences due to slow response times or inefficient processes |
| Substantial savings from optimized resources | Unnecessary expenditure due to lack of visibility and resource organization |
| Increased growth potential of business as visibility into how, where, and when resources are and can be used increases, possibilities for more investments and expansion | Unrealized potential of business due to untapped resources |
If you’ve evaluated your resource management strategy as lacking and want to improve it, start by auditing your existing allocation policy. Review your projects, and ask yourself these questions to determine the health of your resource allocation tactics:
These questions should help you assess your existing resource management strategy and if any further changes are required.
Good resource allocation strategies are structured to ensure efficiency, profitability, and scalability. It also strengthens every other resource management process, such as planning, optimization, and utilization.
With that in mind, here are six industry best practices you should adopt to better optimize resource allocation in your services business:
A final tip as you execute these best practices is to watch out for common allocation mistakes. These include overcommitting resources, neglecting dependencies, relying solely on intuition, and failing to monitor and adjust strategies.
Resource management is not a straightforward science. Often, services leaders grapple with inadequate data, conflicting priorities, limited resource availability, and changing market dynamics. Fortunately, modern resource management software can bring clarity to chaos.
With the right technology, you can eliminate the gridlocks of manual processes. But more importantly, you gain visibility—the secret to effectively organizing and aligning your resources with your business goals.o
When selecting a resource management solution for professional services, ensure it has the following features:
All these equip you to effectively manage your staff and cultivate a work environment that attracts and retains top-tier talent sans the headache.
As the services industry grows, leaders must prepare to pivot and respond to emerging opportunities and challenges. This period is also the best time to execute cost-effective growth strategies.
A great way to achieve this is by combining resource allocation best practices with a resource management software designed for services. As this is part of the professional services automation (PSA) package (along with project management and financial oversight), integrating PSA in your operations is a comprehensive way to achieve resource management optimization.
With the right PSA solution, services leaders get unprecedented visibility into their resources—making allocation frictionless—and gain more control over services estimating, staffing, delivery, and finance on one unified platform.
In this competitive landscape, high levels of insight and control can give your business an edge when it comes to efficiently and effectively aligning resources with business goals, improving enterprise margins and growth while keeping both your customers and employees satisfied. Contact us to learn more.