Your employees, contractors and equipment are vital components of any project. Maximizing efficiency and profitability means that you must always know their capabilities, availability and cost. ProjectPartner makes this easy through its Resource Management and scheduling functions.
Each resource to which you grant login access to ProjectPartner can be restricted to those areas of the application appropriate to their role(s). Even middle management roles which require greater access to enable project management and scheduling can be prevented from seeing sensitive financial data if desired.
Managers can instantly access and modify timesheets for resources in their workgroup—including bulk activity entry—so that even employees with no computer access can have their contribution to your organization’s productivity measured.
A role is a general type of work to be performed, such as “research”, “design” or “maintenance”. Resources (human or material) can have multiple roles assigned to them so that they can be assigned to perform tasks associated with those roles.
Certain tasks may require resources with specific skills in a role, and you may have several resources that can perform that role but which have varying skill levels. For example, you may have many drivers on your transport company’s staff, but only a few are qualified to operate your largest trucks. And the trucks themselves may have ‘skills’ defined by their load capacity.
While not every role within your organization will require skill levels to be set, there are myriad ways you can use skill levels to optimize resource allocations for the best return.
You can set cost and charge rates for each role and skill level. For example, you may employ several programmers with different levels of experience or qualification. These levels may be reflected in the amounts you pay them (your cost), and you’ll probably charge their time out at different rates.
By applying rates to each skill and role, you can measure the relative efficiency and profitability of assigning a task to a lower-skilled worker who might need longer to complete a task than a faster worker whose time is more valuable. Resources that are capable of multiple roles can, of course, have different rates applied for each role, and for their skill levels within those roles.
If the timeframe for a fixed-price quote is less critical than other projects’, you can easily assign inexpensive but slower resources, freeing up specialist workers or equipment for high-priority or more lucrative work. This ensures maximum profitability on both jobs.
It’s also easy to set different rates for different customers, even when using the same-skilled resources in the same roles. This allows you, for example, to charge a charity a lower rate than you would a corporate client for the same project—while continuing to measure them on equal terms.