Resource Management Techniques: Controlling Supply and Demand for Project Success

Control Supply and Demand

Controlling supply and demand in resource management is crucial for optimizing workforce allocation, ensuring project efficiency, and maintaining operational stability. By effectively balancing resource availability with project demands, organizations can prevent overallocation, minimize bottlenecks, and enhance productivity.

Techniques such as resource leveling, capacity planning, and demand forecasting help managers align workforce capabilities with workload requirements, avoiding burnout while maximizing efficiency.

Proper control of supply and demand also enables better decision-making by identifying gaps in resource availability, allowing for proactive hiring, training, or redistribution of tasks. Ultimately, mastering this balance ensures that resources are utilized strategically, reducing waste and improving project outcomes.

Assign Resources to Projects

After populating the resource pool you assign resources to individual tasks on projects in Timebars and Costbars applications to build up utilization. Allocate resources based on their availability, skills, and other attributes captured in the metadata.

Continuously monitor and update resource utilization. Keep track of resource allocations, remaining availability, and any changes in their metadata or custom field values.

Resource allocation

Managers can assess the supply and demand of resources by reviewing the availability in terms of percent allocated on the timescaled canvas or on Resource Usage Report. but first they can assign resources based on their skillset, location, and availability, ensuring that the right resources are allocated to the right projects.

Filtering and sorting

The Resource Allocator provides filtering and sorting options, allowing managers to filter resources by role, skill, location and other metadata. This helps in identifying the resources that match specific project requirements and optimizing resource allocation.

Capacity planning

Resource managers can use the resource pool to analyze resource availability charts and graphs across different projects and timeframes. They can identify periods of high or low demand and make informed decisions regarding resource allocation or hiring.

Detecting Overallocated Resources using Resource utilization reports

Timebars and Costbars offers several views, to visualize resource allocation across projects, where the data is in FTE or Hours, by week or by month and by Name or Role in grid or bar chart formsts. These views help project and resource managers identify instances where a resource may be assigned to tasks that exceed their available hours.