Planning and Resource Management Paper Example

Introduction

Resource planning is a discipline that deals with project management. It is a field in project management that entails bringing together and utilizing all the resources necessary to deliver and complete a project. In this light, resources include people, materials, information technological equipment, and facilities. In general, for creative work and knowledge, the greatest and the most important support is the people. People can be part-time employees, full-time employees, contractors or even freelancers (Umble, Haft and Umble, p.243, 2003).

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Managing of the available talents is also an essential aspect of resource planning. This makes the managers and supervisors work easy by ensuring that that one individual work on a single and a specific duty at a time. Part of resource management is also matching the skills with tasks available. The skill levels are matched with difficulty levels of the functions. Through this, members of the team can do the most challenging and difficult tasks while remaining motivated (Umble, Haft and Umble, p.243, 2003).

The Usefulness of Resource Management in Project Management

Your project depends on resources and how well they are utilized. Resources can either make or break an otherwise good project. How the tasks are planned does not matter so much, what matters is the right resources, and their correct allocation as planning tasks without the proper funds will not turn into reality. Every project has burdensome requirements and tight deadlines, but the project manager has finite resources on their disposal (Altamont et al., p.700, 2016). Therefore, use one of the resources strategically allows the managers to cut on costs and time significantly. That means that resource planning is a very crucial step in project management.

Besides, priorities change during the project. To give room for changes, project managers need to be keen on resource availability and usage so that they can reallocate and shift resources when need be. Resource planning also involves keeping an eye on utilization rates. This is very crucial is clients are charged based on the number of hours.

Finally, it is worth noting that good resource planning can help the manager to strike a balance and a good feeling or mood within their team. When skills are matched with the tasks, the workers feel happy and enthusiastic about the tasks that they are allocated to do. Also, by repeatedly managing the people's skills and abilities and their availability, the managers of the project ensure that the job is shared and divided equally and no individual gets overworked.

The Importance of Resource Management Tools

Resource management can be challenging and challenging at the time, but there are tools which can be utilized to make it easier.

Spreadsheets offer a great but a temporary solution for the planning of the resources. At first spreadsheets seem and appears to be helpful, but in the long run, they become complicated. In the beginning, manual data entry and input is used in a, and this creates room for errors. Again, there is a significant risk of a file overwriting another and multiple versioning. On the hand, the use of right resource planning tools makes it easier for a project manager to work. Most of the resource planning tools have useful features, for example, visual resource planning, real-time analytics, capacity planning and forecasting (Umble, Haft and Umble, p.243, 2003).

Project managers can make better use of resources with the help of these tools. The tasks which are allocated to the team members are monitored and shown by visual resource planning. This makes it difficult for tasks to overlap. Due to its excellent capabilities and great function in reporting, resource management tools help a manager to monitor the utilization rates closely.

The project managers can check on the availability of workers and team members. When a team member completes an assignment, he is seen by the manager, and he or she is assigned a new task. Resource management tool can be used to interlink different teams in a project, and therefore it acts as a reliable communication tool (Umble, Haft and Umble, p.245, 2003). The initial plan is easily shared with clients and stakeholders so that they can know who is working on which task and when.

Resource Planning Tools

1. Teamwork: Teamwork is good and easy to use resource planning and management tools which is browser-based. It is simple looking, but it comes with powerful features which enable a project manager to plan properly and organize resources. Some of its best features include, deep drag and drop resource allocation, assigned hours or time so that no one gets overworked or overbooked and finally it has smart reporting. Teamwork also allows its users to import tasks from third-party applications, for example, GitHub and Trello. It comes with numerous collaborative tools which enable teams and members of the team to collaborate and communicate. This important tool is used by small, medium and large companies such as national geographic, Spotify and Buzzfeed (Douglas and Pressey, p.57, 2017). This great tool known as team week has a free plan that can be used by a team of up to five members. If a team need more than 5, there are premium versions which retail at $34 per month for up to 10 members.

2. Resource Guru: This is one of the most powerful and oldest resource planning tools in the market. It very powerful such that it is used by large firms and agencies with numerous customers. This to come with features like checking the availability of the team, filtering, natural allocation resources, time zone support, reporting and different other customization options (Douglas and Pressey, p.57, 2017). Sick days and leave management are also allowed by the resource guru tool and hence a better view of the availability of resources. Users can manage the availability of employees and resources and can know what they should be working on in the next phase. This tool also prevents resource clash assignment by showing availability for each resource and waiting lists. Resource guru also supports multiple users so that different managers can use it simultaneously or at the same time without distracting the other or stepping on one's toes.

4. 1000 ft plans: this is a resource management tool which is well known for marketing, and advertising in architecture companies. 1000 ft plans are also widely used by consulting businesses, design and management. It comes packed with good resource planning feature which includes drag and drops assignment, task management, reporting and dashboard which gives the current status overview (Douglas and Pressey, p.59, 2017). One of the most distinguishing features of 1000 ft plans is the ability to match the tasks with the skills which allows the project manager to find the right people for specific tasks. This enables the managers to create detailed reports with information such as usage of resources for the project, clients and teams.

5. Float: Many advertising agencies use float as their resource management tool. The float has emerged to be very popular with creative companies such as Buzzfeed, Ogilvy, and Vice due to its unmatched capability. Float comes with all necessary tools required by the project managers to plan resource allocation smoothly, fast editing, easy assignment, live updates, and holiday management disposal (Altamont et al., p.700, 2016).

Features of a Good Resource Plan

An excellent resource plan is made up of schedules that are appropriately detailed for the available information, and the kind of materials and resources needed to complete each task. An excellent resource plan will have a single tsk owner working on each work.

Resource Assignment

It should be noted that in every resource planning tool, it has duration and resource type columns. Duration refers to the time required to complete a task. The skill needed to perform a function is known as the resource type. For the ease of work assigned to an individual, it is essential to understand the duration are necessary to complete a specific action. It is very crucial to match the functions to the skills before assigning tasks to individuals. The second thing is to key in the time needed to complete an assignment about the resource chosen. By doing this, managers have an easy time to analyze a project schedule, give that individuals availability are not constrained (Pollino et al., p.219, 2017).

The expected timeframe to complete a task while considering the general availability of a resource and the skill level is known as the duration. In assigning the length of the work, the reality is supposed to be taken into consideration. If a function is supposed to take two weeks, it can be assigned three weeks since it is known that, the worker is present for work only 70% of the time due to meetings, vacations and holidays (Pollino et al., p.219, 2017).

The table below shows how the resources would be allocated and the tasks respective durations needed for the expansion of the care home assigned.

In the table above, the resource types are known, and the timeframe is changed into a schedule called Gantt chart. The initial resource plan and the program is supposed to be designed and analyzed from the required resource type and not considering the resource availability. The resource and the tasks are going to be assigned as the second step (Jacobs, Chase, and Lummus, pp.533-535, 2014).

Sources of Funding and their Impact on this Planned Expansion Short Term Sources

Savings and assets: personal savings and assets are a crucial capital source. Because savings are owned by the owner of the project, there is no interest to be paid to acquire this capital. Hence it regarded as the cheapest source of required money. This means that as a resource manager of the home care, I would consider the savings as my best source and give it the priority before I can turn to the other sources. The challenges are that if you plow back all your life savings in the project, you can end up losing everything that you have been saving throughout your entire life.

Investors: the investor can assist you in raising start-up capital for a business which helps you to mitigate the risk of losing the money alone. Investors may be active directors in the business, or they can be passive partners who sit and wait for the returns. In my care home I would consider sourcing from investors to avoid losing the so much capital on my own. The problem of involving investors in the project is that you end up losing the absolute control over the business. In addition, you must share the returns of the company just as you would share the risk if things went astray (Gashu and Borji, p.1680, 2015).

Bank loans: another source of funding is loans from private banks and financial institutions. For large investments required to run large projects like care home expansion, leveraging is needed. Assets such as real estates, inventory or large equipment may be required as security for leveraged loans. One chief merit of borrowing capital is that it helps you retain your cash so that you can use it as operating capital or use it during the downtime during survival. When things get out of hand during project progress, you can save your assets by declaring a state of bankruptcy. The demerits of securing loans from banks are that you must pay the principal back with interest (Gashu and Borji, p.1684, 2015). The worst thing is that your repayments are required whether the business is performing well or poorly.

Medium and Long-Term Sources of Capital

Shares: Issuing of shares is the primary source of funds in the long term. Shares are issued to th...