Project Planning and Management Tools and Their Benefits

Did you know that only 26% of organizations use project planning and management tools to estimate and allocate resources and about 36% of them use it very often? Another study points out that less than 60% of projects are able to get completed in the original budget and just 50% of them are delivered on time. So, what’s amiss here?

One of the major parts of project planning and management is scheduling and managing resources efficiently, so that the tasks can be completed on time and within the budget. However, resource management—which includes team members, equipment, and facilities—is not an easy job. It involves resource allocation and scheduling based on resource availability, capacity, effort, and the project scope. Projects fail due to over or under-allocation of resources, which influences profitability, employee trust, client satisfaction, etc. But these things can be resolved by using a good project planning and management tool. There are many benefits of implementing resource scheduling and project planning and management tools in your business operations. Some of top ones are listed below.

Plan efficiently with Project Planning and Management tools

Any project entails various teams, locations, resource types, and vendors. Resource scheduling tools help in organizing various aspects so that you can effectively plan the project. It also helps to define the project well, understand all tasks and sub-tasks, resources needed, how much time will it take, etc. Next, you need to calculate the effort for each task and how many team members are needed for each task. You should also foresee if there could be any constraints, any specific skills required to complete a task, and if there are any other dependencies.

Allocate proficient resources to the right project

Resource scheduling tools consolidates all required information like resources and projects into a single resource plan. You can use advanced filters for selection criteria like specific skills, expertise, qualifications, experience, availability, location, cost, and then assign best resources to the suitable opportunities. The tool also maintains up-to-date proficiency information to match skillset capability with the right task. Project planning and management tools also help in distributing resources across various projects and facilitates the ‘best-visible-best-fit’ rather than ‘first-visible-first-fit’ method of resource allocation, thus enabling maximum profitability.

Enhanced Communications

Resource scheduling and management tools offer project managers with a more comprehensive understanding of the current situations and status. What’s more? There are many tools these days that offer collaborative features. Besides, the shareability options enable your entire team to be on the same page. This way the flow of work is smooth, and therefore, collaboration and team communication is enhanced.

High-level reporting

Reports are important to get valuable information such as budgeting costs, overtime, utilization graphs, meeting times, etc. Resource planning and management tools offer easy-to-design, customizable reports that display all the information that you could need. You can also automate your reports for saving time. Besides that, to enhance your management skills, a software with API integration for all your existing software can help you. You can get real-time updates and a multi-user interface with custom user rights.

Stronger Forecasting

An online resource and project planning and management tool connects the budget and your plan. This offers you a better way to forecast and estimate your resource availability and then make long term plans. By seeing such a plan, you can easily figure out which resource is busy and if they have some free slots. You can also find which resources are completely booked for the coming months and which ones have some capacity to accept additional tasks.

Real-time data and analysis

By using a good resource allocation tool to monitor your project in real-time offers you key data and analysis. You could have multiple resources assigned to one project and they could be operating in different locations. Thus, having a centralized system is important as that can offer you complete visibility into how your resources are being utilized. If there are any changes to your projects mid-way, with the help of real-time analysis, you can find out if there is any under or over allocation of your resources. You can also predict if there could be any delays and adjust timelines in advance.

Increased Accountability

What if you get a comprehensive view of all your resources to increase accountability and raise your company’s bottom line? A resource project planning and management tool ensures that all effort, utilization, and time information is documented. This enables project managers to quickly access, examine, and analyze this vital data. It also ensures that all costs related to human resources are accounted for, which eases the payroll processing, and makes invoicing, and billing systems more efficient.

eResource Scheduler

Enbraun’s eResource Scheduler is a very beneficial and user-friendly resource scheduling and project planning and management software. It enables organizations and businesses to design and execute feasible schedules for their resources for better coordination among teams and fully maximize their productivity and utilization.

eResource Scheduler introduces a scalable design that aids users to modify the configuration of the software to easily tackle resource scheduling requirements of their companies. Its drag and drop interface enables making resource scheduling and management a very simple and quick task. You can create new schedules or modify existing ones easily. The Gantt chart functionality offers you a comprehensive view of your resource schedules along with their availability and total utilization. So, what are you waiting for? Book a free trail now!