Resource managers across all industries are facing new challenges to keep their teams productive and their projects on track. Whatever your team’s level of experience may be, the following five tips can help resource managers find success in 2021.
1. Use Time Tracking to Keep Resources Focused – Not every business uses time tracking timesheets to gauge productivity or project success, but, time tracking can help managers better understand team efficiency. This doesn’t mean that a sudden implementation of time tracking should be used to scare employees into working harder, but rather that the insights gained will be helpful in understanding how to support employees in times of change and improve utilization rates.
2. Schedule Regular Individual and Team Check-Ins – Hold regular team meetings and check-ins with your team members at least once a week to keep relationships intact and projects on track. Encourage meetings that go beyond business updates and touch base with your teams on a personal level to strengthen your management strategies and support both the worker and their work.
3. Help Projects Flow With Gantt Charts – Gantt charts not only create a definitive list of tasks that make up a project but also stack them in cascading order to keep work moving forward. Within projects, tasks will be assigned to appropriate resources, given a timeline for how long each should take to be completed, and will alert resources when their tasks should start. This information helps each project move forward, on time.
4. Utilize Collaborative Online Documents and a Centralized Information Source – Team members are online, your documents should be too. Today, simple documents and spreadsheets can be edited and collaborated on simultaneously by multiple team members through Google Docs while strong online resource management solutions create collaborative tools with live updates to keep every team member informed and involved. The collaboration made possible by these documents is great, but companies will need a way to centralize them and organize documents around resources and projects to make the most of their abilities. Try moving away from offline tools and embrace online real-time collaborative software to keep team members in touch and working together everyday.
5. Give Team Members the Tools They Need – Resource managers may not have immediate insight into what tools your team may need to stay productive. Check in with team members to identify any gaps in access to tools or tasks that have become more difficult to complete. Supporting workers through software solutions and hardware when necessary will keep teams productive.
With these strategies in place for your team, combined with reliable resource management software that can respond to an expanding and distributed workforce, your company can continue to thrive through changing workforce demands.
Ryan Montano
Ryan Montano is a technology professional with a passion for Product Management, Product Marketing, and Product Development. His areas of focus include B2B SaaS, Project Management, Analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, UI/UX design, and Startup Ventures. Ryan has spent nearly a decade in product development working closely with R&D and marketing teams on long-term strategic planning. This has allowed him to help shape countless key technology features and requirements that capture the essence of product value for clients.