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Project Management

How LiquidPlanner integrates Resource Allocation in Project Management

Allocating resources effectively and accurately is one of the biggest challenges for any project. No team is going to have a smooth project experience when the project managers or team leaders don’t know how their team members and budgets are allocated across projects and tasks.

Does this sound familiar?

Manager 1: “Can I borrow Tim for the next couple of weeks to help out my engineering team? He told me he has some free time.”

Manager 2: “My schedule says that he’s booked. And his name’s Tom.”

One of the big problems project teams face is that there’s no shared location that shows how and where resources are deployed. By resources, I mean team members, along with the dollar amounts associated with pay and billing rates. When you don’t have the right data associated with each resource, this turns the act of allocating resources into a guessing game—bad for the project and bad for business.

Where to Start? A Centralized Resource Pool

LiquidPlanner lets you establish a single, centralized, shared resource allocation pool on which all plans and schedules are based.

Here are three ways LiquidPlanner helps you manage resource allocation like a pro:

Set Availability: This is an essential step. To have a realistic view of your team’s availability, start by establishing how many hours a day or week each team member is really available for project work. Everyone has a default setting of eight hours of availability in their profile setting. Individuals can go in and reset their hours to reflect their available project hours outside of other activities such as managing, going on sales calls, taking Wednesdays off, etc. The scheduling engine always considers these figures when updating your plan.

Set Pay Rules and Billing Rules for all work and team members. This way, you can see how much you’re paying out for each resource and how much you’re bringing in. So you don’t just get the who’s who for your project, you also get the valuable how much.

Once this information is set up, the numbers are automatically calculated for work done and work remaining. This can be included in your financial metrics based on data entered by the team.

Assign Work

No unassigned work! LiquidPlanner makes it easy to assign and reassign tasks to individual team members. Every time changes are made to any work item, LiquidPlanner’s scheduler updates the plan, and shows the latest start and finish times based on every team member’s availability. So the more detailed and accurate you can be with inputting all of this resource data and information, the more detailed and accurate—and realistic—your view into your precious resources will be.

Curious to learn more about how to manage project resources in practice, and using LiquidPlanner? Download our eBook 5 Best Practices to Manage Resources Effectively.