Matrix management: Scheduling your resources in a complicated world

Is Matrix Management a complicated word? Or is matrix management a simple word in a complicated world? Matrix management has been created to simplify management in the companies of the 21st century. Despite many businesses implementing such management, its true benefits are only realised when good resource scheduling software is utilised to support it. Businesses today aren’t the way they used to be. Traditionally businesses were small and focused on perfecting a specific area of a product or area in the market. However in the 21st century many organisations are becoming increasingly larger and diversifying within their field as well as across multiple industries. Furthermore, globalisation and the internet have caused services and goods to be offered across borders and seas. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to maximise the efficiency of an organisation’s resources due to the changes in size, shape, structure, and expansion beyond borders and into cyberspace. With all this change and confusion, matrix management supported by effective resource scheduling software has been a beacon of light for burgeoning, successful businesses. Let’s look at this in more detail. The challenge in management today is, due to the growth and increased diversification, many companies carry out many different projects and activities, and these activities are carried out across various divisions, hence requiring a plethora of skills and roles. At the same time, even though the projects are separate they often also require overlapping skills. Instead of wasting money by employing the same roles and skills for each division, companies have started to employ matrix management which enables managers to share employees with the relevant skills across projects. Matrix management means that a pool of workers will be assigned across a set of divisions into teams but also across a set of projects (like a matrix!). Hence employees will have a line manager who takes care of the administration and longer term career focused issues such as staff development, remuneration and career plans, along with a project manager who manages the staff members on the relevant projects. This firstly allows the resources to be used most efficiently in order to minimise the cost of wages for the company. Secondly, it enables teams within an organisation to be more flexible with the work they take on as they are less restricted by their resources – hence increasing opportunities for profit. Matrix management can get quite confusing in terms of accounting for employees when only using a spreadsheet and a human brain. However with appropriate resource scheduling software makes it quite simple. Why? Resource scheduling software holds all the required information on your employees: their skills, their line manager, relevant details of their employment status etc. It also has their availability and schedule for work for the past, present and future. Hence, as far as transparency of your work is concerned, a line manager can easily track those things for administration, budgeting and career development purposes. Simultaneously, project managers are happy because they can get the best resource without having to pay for the wages of hiring a new staff member – all they need to do is simply search through the resource scheduling database and assign available resources to their jobs. Finally the company’s overall bottom line is happy, because the increased efficiency with employee allocation has enabled them to maximise profit, and they can easily track all this information through intuitive software that provides them with powerful, graphically based reports. So how easily can one find such resource scheduling software that supports companies in successfully implementing matrix management? Easily. One such software is SAVIOM Resource Scheduling Software that has been designed to wonderfully suit organisations that use matrix management or are planning to transition into it.