Resource management provides a centralized platform for organizations to plan, allocate, schedule, and track all resources. These resources may include employees, teams, equipment, finances, and facilities.
Resource management enables informed decision-making regarding resource deployment, workload balance, and resource utilization to boost efficiency. Simply put, it’s about planning and scheduling anything that helps a team complete a project.
Resource management software can also help you manage stakeholder expectations, team dynamics, and budgetary constraints by providing an understandable, accurate, and transparent view of resource capacity next to project demands. It helps you streamline and maximize your resource allocation goals so that your team can focus on the right work at the right time.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
The key capabilities of effective resource management software.
Choosing the right resource management software requires understanding the core functionalities that drive value. While specific features vary, effective solutions typically offer a robust suite of capabilities designed to address the entire resource lifecycle, from strategic resource planning to detailed tracking and analysis. The power of these capabilities is directly tied to the availability of real-time, accurate data – without it, planning becomes guesswork, and optimization is impossible.
Here are the essential capabilities to look for:
1. Comprehensive resource planning & scheduling:
- Capacity planning: Resource management and planning tools must visualize teams' and individuals' capacity versus the demands of current and upcoming projects. This involves understanding resource availability regarding hours or Full-Time Equivalents (FTE) and forecasting future requirements. Visual aids like capacity heat maps can quickly highlight areas of concern.
- Forecasting: Beyond current capacity, the software should enable forecasting future resource needs based on project pipelines and historical data. This allows for proactively identifying potential resource shortfalls or surpluses, informing strategic decisions like hiring or training. Advanced tools may offer multi-dimensional forecasting that considers various factors.
- Scheduling Tools: Visual scheduling interfaces, such as interactive Gantt charts or resource calendars, are essential for assigning resources to projects and tasks over time, managing dependencies, and visualizing timelines.
2. Intelligent resource allocation:
- Skills matching: Modern resource allocation goes beyond simple availability. Software should facilitate assigning work based on specific skills, experience levels, certifications, or other relevant attributes, ensuring the best-qualified person is assigned.
- Availability management: Real-time visibility into who is available and when is critical. This requires integrating with user schedules, planned time off, and current workload commitments.
- Prioritization: The software must allow managers to align resource allocation decisions with strategic project priorities, ensuring that the most critical initiatives receive the necessary resources first.
- Flexible assignment options: Features like "contouring" (specifying the exact number of hours a resource should dedicate to a task per day or week) and the ability to easily swap resources between projects provide the necessary flexibility in dynamic environments. Distinguishing between soft (potential) and firm (confirmed) allocations can also aid planning.
3. Real-time visibility & tracking:
- Centralized dashboards: Customizable dashboards provide a consolidated, at-a-glance view of key information, including project status, resource utilization levels, team workloads, budget tracking, and other critical metrics.
- Workload visualization: Tools like workload charts or capacity heat maps provide immediate visual cues to identify individuals or teams over capacity (at risk of burnout) or underutilized (representing potential inefficiency).
- Time tracking: Integrated time tracking capabilities allow teams to log actual hours spent on tasks and projects. This data is invaluable for comparing planned versus actual effort, improving future project estimations, supporting client billing, and understanding actual resource costs.
4. Collaboration & communication hub:
- Centralized communication: Facilitating communication within the context of specific projects or tasks reduces reliance on scattered emails and ensures everyone has access to relevant discussions and decisions.
- Shared access & permissions: Providing role-based access ensures that team members, managers, and stakeholders can view the information relevant to them, fostering transparency and alignment.
- Document sharing & proofing: For many teams, particularly marketing and creative, integrated tools for managing project-related documents, assets, and review/approval cycles are essential.
5. Robust reporting & analytics:
- Utilization reporting: Detailed reports on resource utilization (e.g., planned vs. actual hours, billable vs. non-billable time, capacity vs. allocated time) are fundamental for optimizing performance, identifying inefficiencies, and preventing burnout.
- Performance analysis: The software should provide insights into project progress against timelines and budgets, team productivity, and overall portfolio health, enabling data-driven performance management.
- Forecasting & scenario planning reports: Analytics should support strategic planning by providing data for resource forecasts, budget projections, and potentially "what-if" scenario modeling to assess the impact of different decisions.
6. Integration capabilities:
No tool operates in a vacuum. Seamless integration with other critical business systems – including project management platforms, CRM software, financial systems (ERP), HRIS, communication tools (like Slack, Microsoft Teams, email), and specialized creative or development tools – is vital for creating a connected workflow.
Workfront capabilities for resource management.
Workfront offers a comprehensive suite of tools to enhance every resource management aspect—from planning and allocation to real-time tracking and performance analysis. The table below outlines key capability areas, associated features, and the core benefits they deliver.
Resource management software benefits.
There are many benefits to having the best resource management software for you and your business:
- Maximize efficiency & productivity: By automating manual processes like spreadsheet updates and email chains, these tools streamline workflows, reduce administrative overhead, and minimize resource idle time. Optimizing resource utilization ensures that people can focus more on high-value work; some analyses suggest employees often spend less than 40% of their time on the core responsibilities they were hired for, highlighting the significant potential for improvement.
- Improve project outcomes: Accurate resource planning and allocation are foundational to successful project delivery. These tools enable better project selection based on resource availability, help maintain realistic timelines, ensure projects stay within budget, and prevent the rushed, lower-quality work that results from poor planning.
- Enhance visibility & collaboration: A key advantage is creating a single source of truth. Centralized platforms give managers, teams, and stakeholders real-time visibility into project status, individual workloads, resource availability, and potential conflicts.
- Boost profitability: There's a direct link between efficient resource utilization and financial health. Resource management software can significantly increase profitability and deliver a strong return on investment by minimizing wasted resource time, improving project success rates, and enabling accurate billing or chargebacks.
- Bolster employee morale: By effectively managing workloads and resources, and utilizing your employees’ skillsets, you can ensure employees are engaged and not overcapacity. This can boost morale and sidestep burnout.
- Risk management: Effective resource management software proactively investigates potential issues, helping you plan for and mitigate future project risks or resource constraints.
- Data-driven decision making: Resource management software can provide effective data and insights, allowing you to make swift, informed decisions about your project planning with the data to back it up.
Learn more about Workfront Planning.
AI-powered resource management.
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into resource management software is changing how teams allocate resources. These technologies elevate resource management from a primarily administrative, often reactive, scheduling function to a proactive, intelligent, and strategic orchestration discipline.
The shift is clear: reliance on manual processes and static spreadsheets is diminishing, replaced by automated workflows and dynamic, data-driven insights.
AI is not merely automating existing tasks; it's enabling entirely new levels of optimization and foresight, such as:
- Intelligent allocation suggestions: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, including employee skills, certifications, availability, current workload, historical performance on similar tasks, project priorities, and even stated employee preferences or development goals, to recommend the optimal resource or team for a specific task or project. This moves beyond simple availability matching to accurate best-fit allocation.
- Predictive forecasting: By learning from historical project data, resource utilization patterns, and current pipeline information, AI can generate more accurate and nuanced forecasts for future resource needs, project completion times, potential budget variances, and hiring requirements. AI-powered workload forecasting and headcount planning provide crucial strategic foresight.
- Automated workflows & task management: AI can automate workflows and many time-consuming, routine tasks that burden resources and project managers. This includes updating project statuses, assigning recurring tasks, generating standard reports, inputting data, and sending reminders, freeing up valuable human time for more complex problem-solving and strategic thinking.
- Proactive risk detection & mitigation: AI systems can continuously monitor projects and resource loads to identify potential risks before they escalate. This includes flagging likely bottlenecks, predicting overallocation based on current trajectories, assessing project health through sentiment analysis or progress deviations, and alerting managers to potential issues. AI-driven project health assessments provide an early warning system.
- Enhanced decision making: AI doesn't just present data; it synthesizes it into actionable insights. By uncovering hidden patterns, modeling different scenarios, and providing data-driven recommendations, AI empowers managers to make more informed, strategic decisions about resource deployment, portfolio prioritization, and process improvements.
Contrary to fears of robots taking over, AI in resource management often makes the process more human. By automating the mundane and providing intelligent support, AI allows managers to shift their focus from tedious administration to higher-value activities: strategic planning, mentoring and developing their teams, fostering collaboration, and addressing the unique human challenges that arise in any project. This shift from administration to strategy is a key benefit of AI adoption.
However, the effectiveness of these AI capabilities is intrinsically linked to the quality, completeness, and accessibility of the underlying data. AI algorithms require rich datasets encompassing skills inventories, accurate availability information, detailed project histories, and consistent time tracking to learn effectively and generate reliable predictions and recommendations. Organizations must invest in robust data practices to unlock the full potential of AI-driven resource management.
Ultimately, AI is rapidly becoming more than an efficiency booster; it's evolving into a significant competitive differentiator. Organizations that utilize AI for more agile team formation, accurate forecasting, and proactive risk mitigation can adapt more quickly to market shifts, seize opportunities faster, and optimize resource deployment for maximum impact.
How enterprises successfully manage their resources with Workfront.
The value of any enterprise software lies in the tangible results it delivers for its users. Leading organizations across diverse industries have successfully implemented Workfront to transform their resource management processes, overcome operational challenges, and achieve significant business outcomes.
Their experiences underscore the value of a strategic resource planning and allocation approach.
The Coca-Cola Company.
Facing the complexities of global marketing operations, Coca-Cola utilized Workfront to optimize resource management and capacity planning with an innovative, skills-based framework. This involved allocating marketing associates to high-impact agile teams based on their skills, fostering growth while ensuring critical projects were staffed effectively. They achieved significant time savings through automating task assignments and established a foundation for future AI-assisted capacity planning. Workfront became central to their tech-augmented marketing network, driving efficiency, enhancing global standardization, and ultimately boosting marketing outcomes.
CHG Healthcare.
This healthcare staffing company utilized Workfront to gain unprecedented visibility into its marketing workload, moving from minimal foresight to a three-month forecast. This enabled effective capacity planning meetings where project managers could proactively balance assignments, preventing employee burnout for high performers who might otherwise have been overloaded. The improved planning led to better work definition, higher quality output, and increased collaboration between creative, web, and communications teams, demonstrating deeper employee engagement and satisfaction.
BBVA Compass.
The web team at this financial institution struggled with missed deadlines due to managing requests via email and spreadsheets. Implementing Workfront provided the necessary structure and transparency. By centralizing requests, standardizing workflows, and providing clear visibility into assignments, they regained over 20 hours of team time per week previously lost to inefficient meetings and communication, increased team productivity by eliminating email back-and-forth, improved project throughput by 50% daily, and began meeting 100% of their publishing deadlines.
Workfront addresses the core needs of resource management through distinct but interconnected features:
Streamlined planning and scheduling:
- Workfront Resource Planner: This dedicated tool is designed for strategically forecasting and budgeting resource needs. It allows managers to view demand versus capacity across projects, job roles, or individual users, analyzing availability, planned work (represented in hours, FTE, or cost), and budgeted time. Crucially, it helps identify potential over- or underutilization early in the planning cycle and enables prioritization of projects for resource budgeting. It's important to note that the Planner focuses on high-level planning and budgeting, not assigning specific daily tasks.
- Workfront Workload Balancer: This tool handles tactical, day-to-day assignments and work management. It provides a visual interface where managers can assign tasks and issues and adjust daily, weekly, or monthly user allocations to ensure workloads are balanced and feasible. The Workload Balancer flags overallocation with visual cues (e.g., red highlighting) and allows for directly modifying allocated hours. It intelligently incorporates user time off into availability calculations, automatically shifting allocated hours if configured.
- Accurate capacity settings: Workfront's accuracy relies on foundational settings that define user availability. This includes system-wide default schedules, user-specific schedules accounting for work hours and time zones, defined schedule exceptions (like holidays), user FTE values (indicating full-time or part-time status), and user-specific "Work Time" percentages that designate the portion of their capacity available for project work versus operational tasks.
Optimized resource allocation:
- Intelligent assignment: Workfront facilitates assigning work intelligently to teams, groups, or individuals based not only on availability and project priority but also on specific skill requirements, ensuring the best fit for the task.
- Flexibility and control: Features like "contouring," which allows managers to designate the precise number of hours a team member should spend on a task each day or week, offer granular control over effort distribution. The ability to easily swap roles or users across multiple projects provides agility when plans change.
- Resource Pools: Workfront utilizes Resource Pools – defined collections of users available for project work – to feed accurate capacity data into the Resource Planner, enabling realistic project-level resource forecasting.
AI-driven insights and efficiency:
- AI project health assessment: Workfront's AI proactively monitors projects, analyzing sentiment in updates, tracking changes in tasks and workflows, and assessing completion status to provide a health score. It further alerts managers to potential risks impacting resource needs or timelines.
- AI Workflow acceleration/resource management: Leveraging historical data and current assignments, Workfront's AI can suggest optimal allocations for team members, helping managers distribute work more effectively and efficiently. These AI suggestions augment the manager's judgment, providing data-driven support for allocation decisions.
- AI Assistant & Microsoft Copilot integration: A built-in conversational AI Assistant allows users to find information quickly, get summaries of projects or documents, receive insights, and even initiate actions like creating tasks or issues using natural language commands. Integration with Microsoft Copilot further enhances productivity by enabling seamless project summarization and health monitoring within the user's workflow.
- Other AI applications: Workfront also incorporates AI to assist with tasks like automatically generating campaign briefs from source documents and suggesting appropriate reviewers for content approvals.
Centralized collaboration in the cloud:
- Single system of record: Workfront serves as a central hub that connects disparate teams, tools, and workflows, breaking down operational silos and providing a unified view of all work across the organization. As a cloud-based platform, it supports modern, distributed workforces.
- Integrated communication & approvals: The platform includes features for in-context collaboration on tasks, customizable and automated multi-stage review and approval workflows, and integrated digital proofing capabilities, streamlining feedback cycles and ensuring brand compliance.
Learn more about Workfront with Creative Cloud integration.
Robust reporting for data-driven decisions:
- Dashboards & visualizations: Users can create and share customizable dashboards and interactive views (calendars or timelines) tailored to specific roles, providing relevant insights and visibility into capacity, progress, and performance.
- Comprehensive analytics: Workfront enables detailed tracking and analysis of project performance, resource capacity and utilization, budget adherence (planned vs. actual), and overall team productivity. These insights are necessary for making informed decisions, optimizing processes, and demonstrating the value of work efforts. Workfront Data Connect allows data to be exported to external BI systems or data lakes for further analysis.
Manage your resources with Workfront.
Failure to manage resources effectively carries significant consequences. Projects stall, budgets balloon, valuable opportunities slip away, and the quality of work suffers under the strain of rushed deadlines.
Perhaps most critically, talented employees face burnout when consistently overloaded or misaligned, leading to decreased morale, plummeting job satisfaction, and reduced productivity. Protecting these valuable human resources is paramount.
This is where resource management software emerges as an indispensable solution. These powerful platforms provide tools to effectively plan, allocate, track, and optimize resources—primarily people, equipment, facilities, and finances.
By leveraging resource allocation software capabilities, organizations ensure the right talent focuses on the most impactful tasks. Advanced resource planning software features allow organizations to anticipate future needs and align resources with strategic goals.
Collectively, these resource management tools transform resource coordination from a reactive scramble into a proactive, strategic advantage. Effective resource management, powered by the right software, is no longer a luxury but a fundamental requirement for maximizing efficiency, driving profitability, and fostering a sustainable, high-performing workforce.
Workfront provides the resource management software capabilities to move beyond basic scheduling and reactive adjustments. It empowers organizations with intelligent resource planning software tools for forecasting and budgeting, sophisticated resource allocation software features for matching the right skills to the right work, and real-time visibility to track progress and manage capacity effectively.
By integrating resource management deeply within a comprehensive enterprise work management platform, Workfront connects planning to execution. Its robust features, cloud-based accessibility, powerful integrations, and increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities enable organizations to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, make data-driven decisions, and optimize performance. From preventing burnout with balanced workloads to seizing opportunities with agile resource deployment, Workfront provides the foundation for strategic resource orchestration.
Start managing your resources effectively with Workfront.
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