Resource Management

Challenge

An organization’s employees can be its most valuable asset or its biggest expense. The difference lies in the ability to deploy employees effectively against often conflicting projects and priorities. In order to maximize both task throughput and company morale, resource and project managers need an efficient resource management system to place the appropriate staff on the right teams at the right time.

In the short term, deploying resources ineffectively creates unnecessary costs and delays on projects. In the long term, without a proper grasp of capacity and workloads, organizations may not be able to avoid failed products, inefficient hiring / firing cycles, disappointed customers and decreased revenue.

Manual emails and spreadsheets make it challenging to manage people effectively across an organization. When schedules change, resource managers can quickly lose control of their large teams. It can be difficult to have an accurate view of resource capacities because resource information is frequently maintained by several departments, in several forms and is often out-of-date.

Without proper insight into the skills and availability of staff, an organization is unable to strategically assign, manage or grow resources to suit its objectives.

Solution

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides a comprehensive set of tools to assist in your organization’s resource management and improve staffing decisions. Microsoft’s EPM Solution delivers a combination of Web and desktop tools providing visibility into essential resource data such as capacity, demand and utilization over time, as well as skill and cost information.

Accessible Resource Pool

At the center of the Enterprise Project Management Solution is a centralized resource database, allowing organizations to maintain a comprehensive yet dynamic record of resource information. Whether a resource plan is being used to staff by percentage allocation or fast-moving projects to achieve rapid results, your teams can be quickly deployed and utilized. You can quickly locate the optimal resources for a project, assemble high-performing teams, and attain increased levels of both productivity and profitability through effective resource management.

Resource managers can readily access pertinent information through the Microsoft Office Project Web Access Resource Center, and project managers can assign tasks to the same resources using Microsoft Office Project Professional Resource Usage View. Both tools efficiently share a common pool of information allowing all managers to have access to the same resource management data.

Assemble and Deploy Resources

Microsoft® Office Project Professional 2007 not only provides resource management tools to create skill-based resource assignments, it also offers powerful scheduling tools that can prevent over-allocations. “What if” scenarios can be quickly and easily crafted with multi-level undo. The addition of Office Project Web Access provides instant publishing of task, timesheet, document and reporting information allowing managers and teams to move forward efficiently.

Evaluate Resources

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution for resource management provides the ability to evaluate assignments and determine the availability of individual resources, for teams, departments, or the entire organization across any given time period. It can render resource availability into impactful graphical views, not only allowing managers to firmly grasp work assignments, but also enabling you to accurately evaluate if the organization currently has the skills and capacity to meet existing and future business needs.

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