IT Workforce – Improving Efficiency & Usage Using Resource Scheduling Tool

IT Teams and companies are often faced with similar resource management challenges whether they are sitting in San Francisco or Bangalore, so why do they struggle to effectively address it? Let’s first identify the challenges and then explore how they can address it and why they struggle to address it. Firstly, IT teams are constantly overloaded with multiple projects. This isn’t only large projects, but also many medium and small sized projects. In some cases the projects have very strict timelines and revenues associated with it as there is an external client they’re providing to. In other cases the development is happening for in-house purposes or improvement of a custom made product that they sell. The problem these projects usually have is that they usually have a greater tendency to be under-resourced, with looser timelines, hence can drag on which can become demotivating or frustrating for staff waiting on the outcome. If this load isn’t enough, IT teams are also faced with having to deal with daily help desk and support requests which clutter up the working day even more. The issues that arise from this is most of the projects hence fail to finish on time and go over budget, especially those for internal purposes where the external brand image to the client isn’t at risk. One of the unfortunate thing’s in such cases is the absence of flexible scheduling where some staff members end up being highly overloaded while others are twiddling their thumbs (or more realistically watching youtube) with no work to do. As a result with a stressful overloaded work environment, with projects going over budget and work misallocation amongst the resources, many will start to simply feel over their work. Such an environment can become frustrating and toxic. So what’s the solution? How does one avoid letting resources be overloaded and projects go over time and over budget because of apparent resourcing constraints and imbalances in work allocation? How does one avoid as a result losing their staff members who are simply over their work! The solution is easy visibility and easy allocation. If one can easily see the amount of work the team is taking on and also easily see the number of resources, they can avoid taking on new projects that would overload the team and in most cases result in the overflow of time and budgets for some of the projects they’re working on. Alternatively they can better plan for hiring new staff. However visibility isn’t enough. They also need to be able to easily allocate the existing staff so that there isn’t an imbalance in the allocation of work. The solution is great in theory but how about in practice? Practically speaking you would have a software tool that would allow your company to easily track the workloads of your staff, the resource allocation to projects and the overall resources used vs capacity available. Where workloads can be tracked in percentages, hours and can even raise alerts when there is an over or under allocation. The software tool should enable you to allocate through easy drag and drop functions. Finally you should be able to produce simple to understand reports with powerful graphs and imagery that clearly communicates overall resources used vs capacity available, that can show you your resource budgeting and help managers communicate back to their senior management.rnSuch tool is readily available. Software like Saviom Resource Scheduling Tool is the perfect fit for the problems outlined above, and what’s best is that the tool can be configured to the client’s specific business needs. SAVIOM Resource Scheduling Tool is current market leader in providing such software. It is powerful, affordable and easy to use.