summarize: What Is Resource Management? Resource management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and allocating people, money, and technology to a project or program. In essence, it is the process of allocating resources to achieve the greatest organizational value. Good resource management results in the right resources being available at the right time for the right work. Resource management allows you to plan at any level $$ across the enterprise, portfolios, departments, and teams. Resource management allows you to plan at any level $$ across the enterprise, portfolios, departments, and teams. Resources are essential to reach your goal, whether that be completing a task or a project or helping you analyze what is necessary to do so$.$ Resources are finances, staff, physical space, equipment, technology, and time. The goal of resource management is to use the best combination of resources to satisfy requirements while also realizing these same resources are likely in demand elsewhere in the business. Gartner believes that successful initiative completion rides on balancing available resources against demand, saying, $$Leaders must enable careful initiative prioritization, prevent resource overload, and promote flexible completion timing to maximize value delivery.$$ To understand how to best utilize shared and limited resources, you need visibility into demand and capacity, as well as required skills for particular work versus available skills. You must consider schedules, budgets, and alignment with corporate strategy to make sure you are prioritizing resources across the portfolio to maximize its value. All of this and more fits under the resource management umbrella. The Basics of Resource Management Resource management is critical for organizations to ensure they are optimizing and allocating resources to the right initiatives $$ the initiatives that are aligned to corporate strategy and bring the most value. By minimizing waste and duplication, streamlining and automating processes, and maximizing and speeding throughput, the enterprise is in a better position to respond quickly to customer demands and be nimble to change. Program and project delivery demand better resource management. Regardless of work methodology, leaders seeking to practice effective resource management must balance demand with capacity while also understanding the needs of the business to prioritize, plan, and schedule work with the right teams, people, and skill sets. Gartner says that the opportunity and challenge for leaders is to $$respond and move from a static to an agile planning approach, one that can continually reshape the workforce to incorporate changes in business and skill needs.$$ With increasing demand and change, continuously delivering value with resources is not easy, even for the most mature organizations. It is a common and constant challenge for the enterprise: Making sure there are enough of the right resources and funding on hand to complete work well and on time. And that is where evolved resource management can help. Why Is Resource Management Important? Resource management is all about transparency so you can see, monitor, and attain what is required to deliver projects. It also enables you to minimize both idle time and overutilization of resources. With full visibility both work and resources, you can more effectively schedule, plan, and manage your resources, aligning them with the right projects at the right time. It is easy to see the importance of resource management by understanding the disadvantage of not having it$.$ Without the right data, resource managers have little control over their projects and no way of understanding: Planning and scheduling $$ Understanding what resources are available and when Available and required skills $$ Assessing the skills of each person and whether additional skills $($or people$)$ need to be added Resource utilization $$ Knowing where people are already committed and if those allocations are appropriate Resource capacity $$ Understanding true capacity to do work, recognizing that not all time can be utilized Resource prioritization and allocation $$ Identifying those prioritized initiatives that the most attention and possibly specialized skills Resource management ensures resource managers have on$-$demand, real$-$time visibility into people and other resources so they can have greater control over delivery. When you execute resource management properly, you can help your organization reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost productivity. You also reduce risk, seeing potential resource conflicts early on for more responsive mitigation, typically by reprioritizing projects or resources. In this fast$-$evolving, high$-$demand world, these benefits are exactly what the enterprise is looking for and one that the Project Management Office $($PMO$)$ and $/$ or resource managers can deliver if given the right tools and process to follow.