In today’s competitive world, there is ever-increasing pressure to deliver better quality and more work in less time. Ensuring that your team manages higher volumes of work in a limited time and budget is stressful. Isn’t it? On top of that, many companies are stuck as they do not understand the process of resource management. Because of that, your team members are not happy, and the overall project and employee performance are impacted.
But the good news is that technological advancements these days bring a lot of solutions. For example, the resource management tools can ease your life by helping create project plans, scheduling, resource allocation, making feasible schedules, etc., in a few simple steps. A leading resource management software helps project managers choose the right resources for their projects, make realistic schedules, assign projects per people’s skill set, and optimize their resources.
Understanding Resource Management
Resource management is the art of arranging and managing the people, materials, tools, supplies, and facilities you require to execute a project. This includes planning, scheduling, allocating, and managing your available resources to complete the project efficiently.
This may also involve coordinating with various vendors, your teams, and subcontractors to get the work done. Resource management also means that all resources should be assigned work in a balanced way, and no one should be over-or under-booked. Using extra resources than required may be expensive, and using fewer than needed may slow down production or over-burden your team. This is where resource management software can be beneficial.
Top 10 Resource Management Tools to Manage Distributed and Remote Teams Effectively
Here are the 10 best resource management tools to help you effectively manage your virtual and remote teams.
1. eResource Scheduler
This resource management software is a flagship product from Enbraun helps to consolidate all data and information in one online platform. It provides visibility and flags any challenges and essential insights on scheduling, resource management, critical notifications timelines, and more. This cloud-based resource management tool tracks the overall resource capacity, resource utilization, performance and productivity, and a lot more. The workload management feature is beneficial in distributing tasks between team members in a balanced manner.
This top-rated resource management software eases project planning for multiple projects and helps to improve communication and coordination if you have a remote team. Be it capacity or resource planning, creating timelines, workflow scheduling, resource management, or utilization tracking, this resource management software is the answer. You can manage multiple calendars, easily monitor what people are working on, do time-tracking, get the detailed resource, project, and job profiling, and also manage recurrence or split bookings in just a few clicks. Sign up for a free trial of this award-winning, multi-user tool to find out more.
2. Mavenlink
This enterprise-level and top-rated resource management tool allows you to plan your projects, do resource scheduling, and manage your remote team with ease. The tool offers readymade project templates that suit multiple scenarios while enabling quick estimation of resources. These precise resource estimates help you calculate your costs and profit margins and assess which hiring decisions affect profitability the most. The tool also lets you predict resource needs for the near future and availability depending on your current capacity through detailed what-if analysis.
3. nTask
This project and resource management tool provides an adaptable online platform that enables your virtual teams to collaborate and communicate easily. You can also get an overview of all projects, schedules, calendar and grid views, and Gantt charts that offer the project data snapshot as per your need. The tool’s dashboards and comprehensive reports display the tasks/projects assigned to various people.
This way, the project managers can quickly view and evaluate the workload for each resource. The user-friendly and simple interface enables you to plan, schedule, and allocate resources and manage your projects efficiently. After assigning tasks to all team members, you can easily track their progress and performance in a few steps. nTask also easily integrates with various other apps and software, which helps organize your workflow.
4. ProjectManager
ProjectManager is a project and resource management tool that is beneficial in organizing your projects, resources, multiple teams, and schedules. The software enables you to manage resource planning, resource allocation, and reallocation, as the case may be. The real-time data gives you clarity into your upcoming deadlines, available resources, costs, status, workload, etc. Therefore, you have all the data and information needed at hand. What’s more?
This data is updated in real-time, which helps a lot in doing effective resource planning. Imagine if you get all the information about how busy all your resources are, what they are working on, and when they will be free. This provides more clarity to do better planning. The workload chart offers a color-coding option, which makes the data more transparent by displaying what activities or tasks are done, pending, or assigned to all resources. This further aids in workload balancing.
5. Asana
Another top-rated project and resource management tool, Asana, enables teams to streamline their deliverables and set priorities to focus on important initiatives and tasks. This resource management software helps you put the data of all your resources, projects, etc., on an online platform that helps the distributed teams to collaborate better.
The project managers can structure all projects, timelines, and resources with the help of calendars, notes, boards, Gantt charts, etc. Due to the benefits it offers, about 100,000 organizations spread in 190 countries are using this leading tool for resource management and scheduling. So, if you want to manage your people and projects better, use Asana to work faster and be more productive.
6. Monday.com
This flexible resource planning software tool helps various resources and teams work together, communicate, and clarify the overall big picture of all the projects, resources at hand, and estimated timelines. The tool’s creative design and simple-to-understand interface help you to plan resources for your projects, determine timelines, assign projects, and monitor project status and performance in a few clicks.
This resource management tool has multiple views to showcase the data, and different people can work according to their assigned roles and preferences. The tool’s workload view displays availability or which resource has the bandwidth to accept additional work and who is overbooked. You can also get an overview of capacity and amend the timelines accordingly. This offers the flexibility to project managers to manage their remote team effectively and pull out any data they need from one online platform.
7. Saviom
This leading resource management tool offers a Gantt scheduler that can be synced with company-wide resource activities and schedules. The leave management portal helps correct any resource overlaps and resolve challenges arising from ad-hoc absences or leaves. The software’s analytics suite is a repository for essential data and information, which helps you find any resource gaps or crunches, resource surpluses, schedule disruptions, project delays, etc.
The business intelligence dashboards of the tool get updated in real-time. This helps predict the highest demand competencies, changes in future work pipelines, and precise resource demands. This tool can also be integrated with various other tools with ease.
8. Float
This resource management software is beneficial for monitoring which team member is working on which task, till when, and what its status is. With this tool, you can manage more than one project at a time and check the status of tasks/projects, their milestones, etc., in a single view.
This way, you can do resource planning and schedule easily. The float also helps track the project costs in real-time and calculate the total hours spent, the effort left, etc. The drag-and-drop feature and easy integration capability with other tools help with capacity management, demand forecasting, skills tracking, and a lot more.
9. Smartsheet
This collaborative resource management tool helps in scheduling and managing your distributed teams. It also provides you with priority lists to focus on the most critical activities. The tool can be easily integrated with popular agile tools like Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
Resource Management by Smartsheet helps make confident decisions about your resources, scheduling, capacity management, project planning, budget forecasting, resource utilization, productivity, etc., in real-time.
The tool’s resource and project matching feature is a boon for matching and aligning resources to various projects as per different criteria such as competencies, expertise, resource availability, etc. Create project reports or detailed dashboards by filtering relevant project data, analyzing previous data, forecasting utilization, budget tracking, etc., in a few easy steps.
10. Hub Planner
This resource scheduling software provides features and functionalities to aid small, medium-range, and large businesses. Hub Planner’s brilliant features like location tags and skills matrices are of great assistance in spotting the right resources in the industry for the projects or tasks at hand.
Other functionalities such as resource requesting and vacation management help find the available team members and have the capacity for a project. You can also customize your enterprise plans easily to meet your business requirements. The best is that this resource management tool is available on a 60-day free trial so that you can test it before investing in it immediately.
