4 Best Practices to Keep on Top of Resource Workload

 During the course of your project, you must actively manage your resources.

 

When you have visibility into resource availability and workload, you can do this. Work can quickly end up on the shoulders of only a few essential team members since work transfers from person to person as people collaborate back and forth. This could indicate that others are waiting for them to respond or return the work. You must be able to track certain workflow patterns and reallocate idle resources rapidly.

 

So, how do you go about doing this? You can stay on top of resource workload in four ways.

 

1. Manage work schedule calendars actively.

 

You must be able to track individual resources' hourly and daily availability, as well as their planned holidays and vacations. Keep in mind that worldwide or regional time variances, as well as distinct global holidays that may differ from your home office holiday calendar, must all be taken into account.

 

2. Monitor progress on Gantt and dashboard.

 

You can also check the anticipated vs. actual progress of your overall project to see if there are any resource issues. According to the anticipated effort, a Gantt progress bar should show you how far you've come on a certain assignment. An example of this may be seen in the image below, where the orange bar has a white line underneath it representing the progress of all the sub-tasks. You can also use shading on the larger work bars to assess how far you've progressed on particular jobs. All of these chores are done as intended in this view.

 

You should be able to see the overall progress of the project by looking at a rolled-up view of the Gantt tasks or by looking at a dashboard report. If you're going behind, moving resources around is usually a good method to get back on track.

 

3. Review workload allocation.

 

Another metric to pay attention to is the workload of your team. You'll need to reallocate your resources if all of the work is falling on the shoulders of a few team members while the others sit idle. Another approach to thinking about it is to level your resources by ensuring that they are allocated evenly throughout your team. Monitoring workload is an important component of keeping your resources well-allocated on a daily basis.

 

4. Get resource reports to monitor productivity.

 

When your resources are being monitored in real-time and the project's success is at stake, you'll need to make quick judgments. Use your project management tool's reporting feature to create reports on resource allocation and task progress by individuals. It's critical to keep an eye on resources on a frequent basis, diving deep into data to track productivity KPIs like output and actual effort.

 

Want to learn more about such practices? Enroll in PMP Certification online classes today!