Do your projects often run into unexpected roadblocks? Are some team members constantly overworked while others sit idle?
If this sounds familiar, take a closer look at your resource planning.
Effective resource planning can prevent missed deadlines, uneven workloads, and wasted talent—all while boosting your project success rates.
Here’s how to get it right:
What is resource planning?
Resource planning is a proactive, thoughtful approach to project staffing informed by team members’ skills and availability.
It helps maximize team productivity and project success by:
- Aligning team members with projects that match their skills and interests, leading to increased engagement and higher-quality deliverables
- Preventing burnout with balanced workloads
- Reducing resource conflicts and related project delays
Capacity planning vs resource planning vs resource scheduling
Capacity planning, resource planning, and resource scheduling are all related steps in managing resources. But they all serve distinct purposes:
- Capacity planning: A high-level assessment of your organization’s ability to take on new projects, typically looking three to 12 months ahead. It involves analyzing your team’s current and future bandwidth against the potential workload.
- Resource planning: A mid-level look at your team that involves deciding who should work on which projects—and why.
- Resource scheduling: A detailed look at the project scope and deliverables, where you assign team members to tasks with deadlines.
Benefits of effective resource planning
Strong resource planning means using your team’s skills, career goals, and available time to support your projects and bottom line best.
Here’s how:
- Optimized project teams: Resource planning helps you build all-star teams with the right blend of current skills and growth potential.
- Balanced workloads: No one likes being overloaded with work. And no project benefits from underutilized team members. By intentionally distributing work more evenly, you can prevent burnout while supporting productivity.
- Greater transparency: When team members can see who’s working on what and when, it reduces miscommunications, redundant work, and delays. For instance, the designer can easily track when the copywriter will complete their ad copy. And both developers know which parts of code they’re responsible for—no duplicate efforts here.
- More on-time deliveries: Overbookings and resource conflicts are notorious for causing project delays. By reviewing everyone’s schedules and workloads well before kickoffs, you can avoid them—and resulting missed deadlines.
- Increased team morale and productivity: When team members have manageable workloads and aren’t being shuffled around unexpectedly, they’re less likely to feel frustrated or distracted at work. Which translates to better deliverables and happier employees.
How to implement effective resource planning
While it may take some time to master, the return on investment of resource planning is massive. As you practice and refine your planning process, you’ll reduce overtime costs, meet project milestones more consistently, and increase project profitability.
Following a structured system like ours reduces understaffing, overbooking, and missed deadlines, improving your on-time delivery rate and client satisfaction.
1. Outline the project’s estimated scope
Start with a clear Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to divide your project into phases, deliverables, and tasks.
Like this:
After creating your WBS, consider turning it into a Gantt chart. This project timeline view helps you quickly see task dependencies and project milestones.
For example, here’s what a project timeline might look like for a rebranding project in Scoro:
Next, identify which specific roles (e.g., designers, developers, writers) will handle different components.
Then, estimate how long it will take each person to complete their part of the project successfully. Remember to factor in billable and non-billable hours to create a realistic timeframe.
To demonstrate how this works in practice, let’s revisit our rebranding project example:
Preparation phase (50 hours):
- Research: (Marketing Analyst: 30 hours billable)
- Competitor analysis
- Target audience research
- Trend analysis
- Strategy Creation: (Marketing Manager: 20 hours billable)
- Branding guidelines development
- Messaging framework
- Marketing channel selection
Delivery phase (52 hours):
- Design: (Graphic Designer: 30 hours billable)
- Logo design
- Visual assets creation
- Marketing collateral design
- Check-in meeting with client: (Project Manager: 2 hours billable)
- Review designs and strategy
- Gather feedback and approvals
- Copywriting: (Content Writer: 20 hours billable)
- Website copy
- Social media content
- Ad copy
Resource management software like Scoro makes it easy to define your project’s key parts and roles with its quote builder.
As you itemize services and estimate hours in the quote, you outline your project structure and resource needs.
Create a new quote from any view using the quick actions menu.
Then, add deliverables to the left side of the screen—click preset services from your product database or enter new ones as needed.
Next, on the right, enter your internal costs and set margin targets in the “Cost and provider info” and “Margin” columns.
Then, click “Add Subheading” to structure your quote into project phases.
Once your quote is finalized, click “Save” and then click “Create project.”
After creating the project, if you need to adjust any project details or workload, go to the “Projects” tab. Click on any project to modify the new project’s parameters, timelines, or resource requirements.
Further Reading: Project Cost Estimation: A Guide to Quoting Profitable Projects
2. Assess your team’s availability and existing workloads
Once you’ve outlined your project, determine who should work on it.
Go to Scoro’s “Bookings” tab for your project. Here, you can see tentative time slots reserved based on the hours and roles you entered in your quote in the previous step.
For example, you quoted 50 hours for project management over four weeks. Assuming a five-day workweek, Scoro would automatically split this time across 20 workdays. So, 2.5 hours would be tentatively booked daily (50 hours / 20 workdays = 2.5 hours per day).
The heat map uses different colors and patterns to convey important information:
- Green: Available time
- Red: Overbooked
- Purple: Unavailable time booked with tasks
- Striped: Tentative bookings that aren’t finalized (only available for roles, not individuals)
- Solid: Finalized bookings
Also, the percentages represent how much available time is left out of the total working hours. The daily hour notations tell you exactly how much time is currently booked on the schedule.
This initial view helps you understand the overall demand for each role. And address any immediate scheduling conflicts.
Here, you can clearly visualize your resource availability and potential conflicts, from time off to long-term project commitments. You can also get an idea of which staff members have the bandwidth to handle the new project successfully.
For example, you might see that the Senior Graphic Designer role is in the red zone for the next two weeks.
You would then use Scoro to identify potential solutions, such as shifting project timelines or redistributing workloads, to eliminate resource conflicts.
You can adjust booking timeframes by dragging and resizing the booking blocks to better align with your project schedule.
And to get a long-term view, switch the filter in the “Bookings” tab from days to months. This will help you avoid any resource conflicts further down the line.
Further Reading: Employee Resource Utilization 101: Your Ultimate Guide
3. Assign team members to project work
Once you’ve resolved calendar conflicts and are satisfied with the role-based schedule, assign specific team members to replace the role placeholders.
Consider their utilization rates and unique talents. You’re aiming for a workload that fosters productivity but not at the expense of your team’s well-being.
For instance, if senior developer Jane shows a utilization rate of 120% and junior developer Tom is at 60%, consider moving some tasks from Jane to Tom to help bring her down closer to a more balanced 75 to 80% sweet spot.
Additionally, this gives Tom more valuable experience to apply to future projects, expanding your team’s skill set without needing to hire more people or outsource work.
Alternatively, if you have a different, time-sensitive project, it might make more sense to use Jane, who can work faster and still deliver high-quality results.
When assigning specific team members, click the three dots next to the placeholder role. Choose “Assign User” and select the appropriate team member.
Once you’re satisfied, convert tentative bookings to fixed bookings.
Click the booking you want to confirm, and a window will appear. Then, simply change the booking from “Tentative” to “Fixed.”
And if someone becomes unavailable, Scoro makes it easy to transfer work between team members.
You can transfer bookings by clicking the three dots next to the user’s name, choosing who to transfer the bookings to, and confirming the transfer by selecting “Transfer bookings.”
4. Connect with your team members on resource scheduling
Congrats, you now have a resource plan in place! The next step is resource scheduling or assigning actionable, day-to-day tasks to your chosen team members.
Clear, well-defined tasks are key for successful project execution. When team members lack clearly assigned tasks, they may:
- Waste time trying to figure out what they should be working on
- Duplicate efforts by unknowingly working on the same things
- Miss important deliverables and deadlines
- Struggle to prioritize their work
- Feel disconnected from the project’s overall goals and progress
This is where you would head to the “Planner” view in Scoro.
The “Planner” lets you drag and drop tasks from a list onto team members’ calendars to assign work and set deadlines.
But be sure to include team members in conversations about task assignments. This shows them that you care about their input and strengthens collaboration. And they may have insights about timelines, potential challenges, or resource needs that you haven’t considered.
Imagine you’re managing a website redesign project. After speaking with UX designer Sarah about her workload, you can now:
- Drag and drop the “UX Research” task to her schedule for the first week
- Create a new “Wireframe” task and assign it to her for the second week
- Add a “Visual Design” task for your graphic designer, Mike, scheduling it to start after Sarah’s wireframe is complete
- Adjust the duration of surrounding tasks if needed by simply resizing them in the visual interface
Check out our guide on resource scheduling for more info on assigning work to your project teams.
Use Scoro as your resource planning tool
Tools like Scoro simplify resource planning. They are a central hub for all project information and team schedules, helping you make smarter, faster decisions about who’s working on what and when.
Just take it from online marketing agency Stramark—the company saved over 15 hours a week by using Scoro features like the Planner. If you’re also ready to take control of your resource planning, give Scoro a try.
