5 Best Project Resource Management Software

Resource management mainly focuses on managing an organization’s human resources. However, a resource is anything that’s needed to execute a task. This can include:

• Labor
• Equipment and tools
• Supplies and materials

Resource management software must allow you to achieve full visibility into everyone’s workload. As well as availability. That way, you can easily know who is doing what and determine who is ready to take in more work.

Including those who are over capacity. It makes it easy for managers to balance workloads and prioritize tasks in a manner that optimizes schedules.

Effective Project Resource Management Tools

There are a lot of moving pieces when growing a business. From managing people, schedules, and projects, to ensuring the right expense reporting, managing all these in one place can be challenging. This is precisely why you need a project resource management software.

In this article, we let you in on some of the best project resource management software.

1. Project Manager

   This is a comprehensive project and work management software. It can manage and track your project resources with ease of use that its competitors lack. It helps with organizing resources, projects, tasks, as well as teams. This makes it easy for you to plan, schedule, and reallocate the required resources.

   Live data provides visibility into resource schedules and the tracking of labor costs. It also gives you visibility into the workload and the progress of tasks in real time.

   Resource planning is a very challenging aspect when it comes to managing a project effectively. The good news is that ProjectManager makes it easy to identify and categorize teams, supplies, and equipment. This makes planning and scheduling on the Gantt chart quite easy.

   Note that Gantt charts schedules resources depending on their availability and skillset. This enables you to keep an eye on the costs and the workload. That way, you’re able to keep to your budget and avoid burning out your team.

   Remember that your team members are your most important resource. Thus, you need software that knows how busy they are without getting in their way. A color-coded workload chart gives you visibility into how many tasks are assigned.

   You can then balance the workload and reallocate resources if necessary. You’ll, however, need to know about your team’s availability, especially if they are hybrid or remote.

2. Runn

   Runn, which has been in the market for two years now, has the slickest and most intuitive interface. One glance at this tool and you can view all your project timelines. That includes the tentative ones that haven’t materialized from a sales perspective.

   While using this tool, tasks get planned through a simple drag and drop. The editing options include splitting of tasks and multiple-selection to ease resource planning.

   Runn also allows users to add placeholders, thereby accounting for work that needs to be done. Some people complain of not knowing who to allocate work to, and that’s where placeholders come in.

   This project resource management software also comes with different rate cards. This helps in factoring in junior and senior payment rates. It also boasts of visual charts that can evaluate your team’s workload and availability.

   Runn also helps to evaluate utilization in terms of the billable and non-billable work. Another addition of this software is the people’s cost chart. This enables users to see the overhead incurred daily with salaries.

   This software stands out through its dynamic financial reporting. It allows you to personalize your reports. Making it easy to monitor the project’s profitability, performance, and overall spending.

3. Easy Projects

   This resource management software was designed for midsize to enterprise level teams. You can use it for IT, marketing, operations, and professional services.

   This software also automates your workflows, which saves you time. Your teams can automatically create template-driven projects based on the available resources.

   Easy projects also comes with a more visual resource planning and project reporting user interface. You’ll also find Gantt charts, collaboration tools, and kanban boards. This makes it more of a full project planning software.

   The issue with this software comes when two people are working on a task and one completes before the other. Whoever completed first will continue receiving notifications until the other person has completed.

   The software also has issues with resource allocation reporting. That’s because project stakeholders don’t get the full Gantt chart view unless they have a license. Whereas there are some issues with this tool, its overall visual style is very appealing. This makes using the software fun and functional.

4. Float

   This is the leading web-based resource scheduling software. Float is packed with a lot of helpful features despite its simplicity.

   The people area shows users the whole team’s schedule and their current workload. To get more data, simply use the search bar. Also, you can use predefined filters that sort information in a descending or ascending order.

   Float also comes with an activity feed. This enables you to follow updates as they unfold chronologically. It also allows you to spot inconsistencies along the way.

   If a user wants to update the schedule, they can just right-click on a task to split and reassign it. You can also choose to duplicate it on the go, or use the quick shortcuts to apply the exact change to multiple tasks. Many people love the speed and smoothness of the updates.

   Users can set a schedule status to alert the team if they are working from home or out of the office. You can also use it to alert the team about tentative tasks in case they had not been confirmed yet. User profiles also come with job titles, departments, and tag fields.

   This makes it easy to organize a team with searchable terms. You can also clock in your work-time and compare it with the initially scheduled hours. This is all thanks to the pre-filled timesheets.

   When it comes to reports, Float doesn’t disappoint as it displays logged VS scheduled hours. It also displays future scheduled workloads, including billable Vs. non-billable ratio of logged hours in an easy-to understand bar chart timeline.

5. Forecast

   This software is used in professional services, agencies, consulting, and software sectors. It provides users with real-time data. This helps with resource planning and the improvement of key performance indicators.

   Forecast utilizes artificial intelligence to help with resource planning including the selection of the most suitable team members to work on particular projects.

   The disadvantage with this software is that it lacks reporting tools. This results in poor tracking and difficulties in learning from past projects. Some users praise it as a forecasting tool. However, they also criticize its project visualization. That’s because it gets confusing when dealing with large teams in big organizations.

Conclusion

Project resource management software has come a long way from spreadsheets prone to human errors. That’s the reason we decided to give you a detailed review of some of the best tools. We know this will help you match your current project demands with resources.

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