MANAGEMENT FOR DESIGN BUSINESS JOURNAL 110 HOW TO INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY AND REDUCE THE NEED FOR MORE PEOPLE Introduction “How do you manage in today’s challenging economic climate and how do you access skilled and capable people to work on your projects?” Yes, things are challenging fiscally for Architects, Engineers and Consultants — because they rely on people and skills! Through good or bad times, the equation that defines business success for professional service businesses remains the same: optimising people skills and capacity = increased profitability. While the math may be simple, of course, the realisation of this potential can be a lot more challenging. Great resource management is the key to solving this equation. It effectively provides a framework within which businesses can easily and effectively plan, implement and deploy their people skills. This business journal explains what resource management is, and outlines the ‘Best Practices’ to adopt to optimise resources and therefore maximise profitability.
What is resource management? You may already be familiar with acronyms such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), PM (Project Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and the business solutions that underpin these disciplines.
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Great resource management is the key to solving this equation. It effectively provides a framework within which businesses can easily and effectively plan, implement and deploy their people skills.
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Resource management (RM) is often seen as a ‘sub-set’ of these processes. Resource management may also be known under other names, such as ‘people planning’ or ‘utilisation’ — but in-essence, it is a solution for planning, managing and deploying the right people and skills on the right projects for the right amount of time. In our experience, only around 20 percent of firms recognise and use resource management as a high-value, stand-alone discipline in its own right — which is surprising given that the management
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