Self-Assessment Guide for Resource Management

How is your company doing managing utilization of billable resources? Are you struggling to maintain reasonable margins? Do you have issues with quality or project management? If your answer to any of these is yes, then read on.

This guide is intended as a self-assessment tool for companies that want to better understand how their execution of resource management processes are contributing or inhibiting the bottom line. While I will address the clear relevancy of utilization performance (and indirectly related cost performance) in this guide, I will also provide context and assessment ideas for other operational implications of resource management.

With more than 30 years in the services business, an important observation I have is that most services operations have (wisely) invested in operational processes for quality and project management, but not for resource management. These same organizations go through the usual ups and downs of process execution, making necessary adjustments as prescribed by their chosen quality or project management process. Resource management again is either overlooked or receives inconsistent attention, all while the underlying causes of failure in quality or project performance are often directly related to a simple failure of not having the right person in the right place at the right time.