Resources are supply or stocks of staff, money, materials, and other relevant assets drawn by organizations to attain effective operations. These assets are critical to the existence, growth, and sustainability of any business entity and require proper management to realize effective results.
Advertising and Creative Agencies are businesses that deliver services to many clients simultaneously, which requires a lot of organization and strategy to be able to use resources efficiently, especially its human resources. In fact, there are several signs that we can notice when an organization of this type is mismanaging resources.
Signs of Poor Resource Management within Agencies
Most of the time, agencies have the right resources, however, the teams are often overworked because the project managers do not have enough visibility to distribute the work. That is why eventually dissatisfied employees will move to find better and appreciative opportunities.
The outright sign of poor resource management is the low employee retention rate.
Without proper resource management tools such as COR, the available resources entrusted to the agency will be underutilized or exhausted without clear guidelines and trace of how they were employed. COR as a resource management for agencies tool is designed for planning and visualizing your team’s projects and tasks in a single place.
Another sign of poor resource management comes from ineffective communication and coordination of work. When messages sent out are not clear and there is no clear work organization, duplication of roles and misuse of the engaged resources becomes the norm. Besides, the element of micromanagement and excessive employee oversight points to the ineffective sign of resource utilization.
Another indication of poor resource management is the constant failure in planning how much talent is needed for each project, which results in failing to meet the set deadlines. Further, poor resource management is also seen in the overworking of the team.
Some agencies may have managers bend on rewarding their friends instead of the hardworking merited employees. Another indicator is the objective lack of employee compensation. That is, not having objective data on who should be compensated and who should not. This can only be possible if you have visibility into everyone’s performance in a tool that reflects the productivity of each employee. Promotions can be given arbitrarily depending on how one is close to the resources or performance reviewing officers. The people put in charge of programs are clueless on what to do, what resources to use, and how to account for everything at the end of the task. This rigidity leads to overworking and undervaluing employees alongside misplaced use of the resources.
Tips to Improve Management within Agencies
Advertising and Creative Agencies are large organizations that are dealing with numerous projects at the same time. This kind of organization incorporates resource planning tools that are fit for each project or program. Though the continuous project features might be different or running concurrently, it is critical to perform proper resource allocation to know which assets go where and at what point and time. Further, the resource management tool provides for the assignment and placement of people and strategies correctly per project and program.
The adoption of the use of resource management software is a necessity to help curtail drainage or mismanagement of the available resources. The resource management software works in a way that streamlines operations, tasks, and the use of all resources employed to specific projects or a collection of programs. This system works in hand with the existence of effective communication and coordination of operations within the company. Managers must ensure that clear and concise messages are disseminated across the board with direct and understandable coordination of events and tasks to everyone involved with the project.
Also, agencies must employ the use of reliable and transparent management and reward systems meant to appreciate and recognize the efforts of the employees. Since mismanagement of resources, at times, happens due to employee churn out, addressing the root cause of these departures is a must to save the company’s potential losses. Appreciation of employees works wonders in boosting the morale of the team members to realize their worth to the company and seek growth within.
Furthermore, the agency must ensure that the workforce is matched with the prescribed ideal workload to eliminate any overworking. The projects earmarked for execution must be relevant, active, and with clear marked deliverables and timelines.
In order to grant the central capability of managing all the processes, technologies, and methods employed to control the use of resources, every agency should create a project portfolio management system. Project and resource management systems give project managers the ability to analyze and mutually control ongoing or proposed projects by relying on several critical characteristics like resource scheduling, resource conflict resolved by use of granular reporting, resource capacity, and resource availability. This kind of tool helps in budgeting and prioritization of events and tasks to ensure that only projects with immediate needs are delivered. The project managers can rely on the project and resource management system to align human resources based on their skill sets with ideal resource planning tools to achieve set project targets.
It is recommended that agencies purchase project management software that helps provide resource management solutions by initiating a project plan. The project plan covers project resource utilization that will instill the aspects of integrity and accountability when putting to use all the assets meant for the program execution.
Further, through this kind of software, the human contacts that are bound to lead to frictions are eliminated as the system provides for clear guidelines on the deliverables. The decision-making process becomes faster and involves, as all stakeholders are given a hearing to contribute on what they think is the appropriate channel to follow in making use of all the available resources without being overworked.
Why is Resource Management Important to Profitability?
Every business entity or venture operates with a view of making profits and attaining sustainability in the long run, unless it is a non-profit based organization. Even the community-based non-profit organizations require an element of proper resource management to get to their intended goals and destination. Whatever processes and systems employed by such businesses, they work together towards achieving this common goal of profitability with the least resources possible.
Unfortunately for some businesses, failure comes from overworking of the very needed resources to meet the set targets. Proper resource utilization is a necessity for any business entity to meet its profit targets due to various reasons.
The management of resources grants agencies the power to keep track of their expenditures, especially during the employee onboarding process. Perhaps the first point to note is that the cost of hiring, training, and onboarding new employees take up to a third of business expenditures.
Proper resource utilization ensures regulation of the labor costs in compensation and benefits.
The element of planning and decision making, which are part of resource planning, play a significant role in attaining profitability. These components chat a way forward in determining the new projects to pursue, project budgets, and pricing aspects of the entire venture. The decision-making process provides clear time tracking procedures on an ongoing project to ensure everything is on track. The meticulous processes of planning and decision-making work hand in hand to ensure the least amount of resources are committed to a course to save on cost and build on profits.
An important aspect of resource utilization to profitability is the reduction of administration costs. Some companies rely on outdated and ineffective systems to keep their operations going. These beaten-up systems eat into the company’s resources huguley, including the possible profits. An agency needs to set up an updated central resource pool that reduces administration costs. The costs initially incurred in maintaining previous non-functional systems. By using the right project and resource management software, companies can improve their revenue by growing healthy customer relationships. These systems have a design of providing the visibility, opportunity, and control of the resources at hand to generate a concerted effort of operating towards profitability.
The Future of Resource Management: Artificial Intelligence
The world is fast becoming a technological framework where every aspect of life is being influenced by technology. In Resource Management, the application of technology through Artificial Intelligence is faster gathering pace. AI helps to automate processes and help humans make the work simpler. AI Software in use grants interaction between the employees and software to properly manage and utilize resources at their disposal. The question lingering in most minds is, what is the role of artificial intelligence in the future of resource management for agencies?
Artificial intelligence permits the abandonment of intuition and embracing delegation of work with precision in resource management.
The use of tools like COR relays the actual-time visibility of the team’s work through the availability of each team member by using dynamic Gantt Charts that grant the ability to assign and reassign tasks and moving deadlines. Saturation of talent is avoided as workflows are distributed accurately and efficiently.
Further, COR enhance capacity planning in checking the visibility of the team’s work by estimating the number of talents needed to accomplish projects.
Proper business intelligence dictates that an agency should engage the services of management software to manage its resources. A software in point is COR, which allows the estimation and calculation of a project’s profitability in real-time. The AI software gives the ability of loading automatic hours and calculating in real time the operational capacity of the equipment. The system is advanced in managing finances and resources employed in a project with the real-time outcome. The functionality of COR is designed in a way that it increases business earnings by up to 42%
COR has excellent features better at taking care of monotonous manual assignments. These tasks are often time-consuming, repetitive, and take up a lot of the team’s time that would have been utilized doing other productive non-automated tasks. The automation of work by COR tools utilizes minimal resources with great results as compared to traditional ways of working. With COR, an agency stands a chance of saving greatly on its costs due to shifting from manual processes to automatic reporting. Project Managers are left with ample time to dedicate their time to the human element of project management that involves leadership, motivation, and solving emerging problems.
COR enables businesses to manage their present and future in actual time. COR is used in forecasting and calculating the business profit based on current and projected profitability by previewing the project’s progress, status, charged team, project’s life cycle, frequency, and budget. The reviewing and tracking are also done by use of Kanban boards and to-do lists.
Work is, therefore, organized in a customized manner and accessible through a dashboard that permits the drag and drops actions on actionable tasks. The tool is responsible for setting deadlines, sending messages, delivering professional services, marking tasks states, and aligning leave management. The automation of tasks is done through an in-built projects templates, and timesheets, leading to the achievement of standardized operations and recovery of billable wasted hours on manual tasks.
