However, if you’ve got a small team (or just looking for a tool for yourself) then Excel has its merits. For a large organization, it can be resource hungry and impossible to keep on top of when you consider the amount of effort to build that corporate picture. There is still a ton of organizations that use Excel as their primary resource planning tool.
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Of course, there are a lot of funky pro tools out there you can use, e.g those you can use that link into your MS project plans or corporate MRP systems, your resource plan Excel template isn’t that.
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OK so let’s get to it – How to create a resource plan in Excel.
While this sounds a little daunting, with a resource plan in place this can quickly and easily be highlighted and the business can then take the required action. If your business is like mine you’ll find competing projects/departments with over-optimistic views on their project schedules and demanding requirements that actually need more hours than the workforce can practically commit to. The hard bit is coaxing out of the business what the demand forecast looks like. The good news is that there are a huge variety of tools out there you can use to plan/track resources (we’ll cover how to create your own in Excel later in this article, it’s easy to do and can produce great results). This is where businesses require two things.Ģ) A review cycle with key owners/stakeholders. Without some foresight, resource planning can become extremely demanding. What’s your business like? sound familiar?Īs projects flex (often due to additional tasking being loaded or problems arising) businesses can find themselves trapped in a vicious circle of calculating resource plans time and again where tools are not used.
They can help you ensure that your resources are working at an appropriate capacity,.
The key benefit around Resource plans is that they help support decision making around running a team i.e. Perhaps you’re looking to see whether you can support new projects or tasks, you might want to look at how balanced the workforce is (i.e are some individuals undertaking more tasks than others?) If you are running a team, you’ll want to identify what work that team is undertaking. It can be used to show the overall demand on your available capacity. This is where the resource plan comes in.Ī resource plan is a single source of data that represents what work is being undertaken & when vs the resource that will be used to undertake the task. Without an adequate resource plan, your project planning is probably bust – you’ll be thinking you’ve got that resource to do that important task where in reality you haven’t and your schedule goes up in smoke. Whether your running complex product manufacture or projects such as continuous improvement, being able to manage your resource requirements and getting an overview of your resource demand can be a complex challenge.