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Imagine overseeing a high-stakes project with a tight deadline, only to realize that a key team member already has their hands full with tasks. You suddenly find yourself scrambling for a replacement while the deadline looms.
If this sounds familiar, then you know how important tracking resource availability is. It can be the difference between your project succeeding or failing. But often, tracking resource availability is hard to determine due to a lack of visibility, outdated data, or using the wrong tools.
In this short guide, you’ll learn what resource availability is, the factors that affect it, and how to track it to ensure your projects get delivered without a hitch.
What is resource availability?
Resource availability refers to the accessibility and readiness of various resources, such as time, money, materials, personnel, or equipment, to be used for a particular purpose or project. It is an essential part of effective resource management.
Resource availability is a key factor that impacts your project’s success. If essential resources are lacking, it can lead to project delays, increased costs, and failure.
5 factors that affect the availability of your resources
The number of resources available for your projects is often determined by prioritized projects, time off, admin work, and planned work. Availability of resources is often affected by a combination of these factors.
1. Scheduled projects/tasks
If multi-project work is the norm in your organization, the people on your team would have their time divided across other projects at the same time. These ongoing projects will take up your team’s time and reduce their availability. Scope creep and project delays from other projects can also eat up their hours.
2. Prioritization of projects
When planning resources, the most skilled people are allocated to projects that align closely with business goals. For example, if a new product feature is going live in a few weeks, team members might be moved from your team to support the project.
3. Administrative tasks and meetings
According to Asana’s Anatomy Of Work Global Index 2022, workers lose nearly 3 hours in meetings daily, which is about 15 hours in a 40-hour work week. The same report shows they spend about 58% of their time doing admin tasks. While meetings and admin are important, they can take up chunks of time that could be used for project work.
4. Time off
Your project might grind to a halt if a team member working on critical project tasks takes time off without arrangements for a replacement. In a global team, holidays might vary, which means some people might be out of the office when you least expect them. Aside from planned time off, sick days and emergencies might make an integral team member in your project unavailable at the last minute.
5. Employment type
A project staffed with 40 hours a week full-time employees would have more resources than a project with team members working part-time or as contractors. Part-time workers and contractors only have a limited time and are not always available on demand.
How to track resource availability
Although resource availability is constantly changing, there are ways to monitor it and spot shortages before they happen.
Monitor team allocations and time off in a centralized location
Keep track of who is working on what and when in a central location.
Project management software does not provide a clear picture of your team’s availability. Instead, they only let you track your project plan and meetings scheduled by your team. You are left without information on your team’s time off or who’s working 40 hours or 20 hours.
This is why capacity management tools like Float are a better option for tracking resource availability. Float combines real-time data from calendars, project management tools, and Slack to provide an overview of your team’s allocations, work hours, and availability. It also includes information on employment type, skills, work hours, and location.
Estimate resource requirements using tentative planning
How many people do you need to complete your next project? What skills and roles are needed? How many people with those skills have availability during the project duration?
Tentative planning is your only bet at answering these questions. It shows you what project resources you’d need and if they are available when needed, enabling you to make informed decisions.
Let’s walk through how to create a tentative project in Float.
First, create a new project or use a template that matches your project.
In the project setup menu, click on Tentative.
Then start creating tasks and scheduling resources. All the tasks in your project would appear on the schedule with a color outline to differentiate them from other projects.
Once you are done setting up your project, you’ll have a clear picture of who you need to work on the project and when.
Keep an eye out for overallocation when scheduling
People who are working across projects might be assigned more hours than they have available. To avoid schedule conflicts and overloading your team members, you must always be on the lookout for overallocation on your project schedule.
Let’s say you have assigned a contractor who works for only 4 hours a week with a task for 8 hours across 3 days in Float. The overtime indicator (the area in red) and the work hours displayed beside their profile will alert you to the overallocation of resources immediately.
You can then adjust by looking for a resource with similar skills and availability.
You can also spot and manage heavy workloads using the utilization reports in Float.
To see the reports, navigate to the Report dashboard on the top left.
Click on the Filter option to choose what utilization levels you want to see. You can pick from the pre-filled filters like a person, project, or department or type in your own tag.
Once this is done, Float will automatically calculate the overtime hours for you.
If you want to find a specific project or person with overtime, you can use the filters to narrow your search.
Establish rules to govern the tracking process
Your project team needs to know the expectations around tracking availability to keep the information updated and accurate. This requires you to establish a governance process. It should cover
- What information is logged in your project planning tool, e.g., resource allocation, paid time off, and planned work
- When it should be logged into the tool, e.g., at the end of the week
- What tools should be synced to the software, e.g., Google Calendar or Slack
Assign someone to be in charge of ensuring these expectations are adhered to. That would likely be the project manager or someone you decide to delegate to.
Have a time-off policy
Having a time-off policy helps you manage leave in the workplace. It ensures that there are guidelines workers follow when requesting time off work. It also helps you minimize the disruption that taking leave last minute might cause, especially when you’re in the middle of critical project milestones.
If there are no rules in place about taking time off, consider setting some in place. Here are some of the key factors you should include in your time-off policy:
- Have a notice period: There must be a required notice period for employees taking time off. It will also minimize any disruption that an employee’s absence might cause to your project plan. We recommend a minimum of a week’s notice to give them time to wrap up unfinished tasks and for you to find someone to fill in for them if necessary.
- Set an approval process: Ensure that a manager reviews and approves team members’ requests for time off before they sign off. For instance, time off requests in Float are sent to the manager for approval.
- Set holidays beforehand: If you use floating holidays, get team members to set their holidays in your project planning tool at the beginning of the work year or project.
5 challenges of keeping track of resource availability
For many project managers, resource availability is a game of hit or miss. This is due to a lack of visibility of team capacity and the factors that affect it.
1. Limited visibility into your team’s current and future capacity
While planning a project, you check a team member’s schedule on a spreadsheet, and they appear to be available for 30 hours a week. But in reality, they have even less time because they spend 2 hours in daily meetings, 3 hours doing admin tasks, and have a day off planned.
Hidden elements can impact the availability of your team members and make planning difficult.
It’s even harder when you can’t tell what your team members will be working on in the future. You might schedule them for a project during the planning stage only to find out they have other tasks lined up or have planned time off.
Emily Feliciano, Creative Resource Manager at Atlassian, encountered a similar challenge. Without a dedicated resourcing tool, she had to depend on a mix of project management tools, meetings, and the word of team members to gauge availability. With Float, she could easily access an up-to-date team schedule, allowing her to assess capacity accurately.
2. Using the wrong tools to track availability
Having a team of talented people is one thing. Knowing who is available to take on work is often the hard part. Especially if you don’t have a clear picture of their capacity. We are looking at you, spreadsheets 😒.
While spreadsheets are a popular tool for tracking project resources, they are not the ideal software for tracking resource availability.
They are often siloed and don’t integrate other project planning tools. Manual data entry makes them prone to human error.
For example, the capacity management team at Scholz and Friends initially used Excel sheets to monitor team availability and plan capacity. However, spreadsheets proved inadequate as the agency grew and project demands increased. They couldn’t easily tell which team members had the right capacity and skills to work on projects. And when it turned out that everyone had too much to do, they’d have to scramble to find freelancers to work on projects.
Switching from an Excel sheet to Float’s visual schedule made it easier to predict team capacity and make informed decisions, such as bringing in freelancers when the team was already busy.
Unfortunately, project management tools are no better as they only provide a high-level overview of your resources, leaving you unable to predict availability. For example, Asana can tell you who is assigned to what task, but not if they have two-hour meetings every Thursday.
Use a project planning tool that syncs with all your favourite apps
Float integrates with your project management tools, calendar tools, and productivity tools to give you a full view of your team’s availability.
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3. Absence of governance around the resource management process
You can have a resource planning tool, but if no rules dictate how availability is tracked, you will end up with inaccurate information.
Imagine what would happen if no one allocated resources in the tool until a few hours before the weekly resource meeting. Anyone looking into the tool beforehand would get the wrong idea of resource availability.
4. Sick time and other unexpected circumstances
People might catch the flu, be involved in a project with scope creep, or experience project delays that take up their time. These events are often beyond the project manager’s control and can impede project delivery.
💡Use our tentative planning feature and project reports to identify where you need extra hands before you even start a project.
What to do in a resource shortage
First, don’t panic. Resource constraints are an unavoidable part of every project.
Below are some actionable tips you can use to manage resource shortages:
Request more resources
If there’s a resource shortage, you should ask for more people to be allocated to the team. Depending on your organization, you might have to file a resource request with the resource manager. If you don’t have a resource manager, you can ask department heads for additional people to help out.
Before going in, gather enough data to back up your request. If you use Float, you can collect data on utilization rates to show how overwhelmed your team is.
Once your request has been reviewed, the resource manager or department head might assign someone with similar skills to what you require or bring a freelancer on board.
Learn how the team at Accounts and Legal reduces resource shortages by using Float to understand their hiring needs.
Read nowChange the project schedule
If your project is already in progress and the resources are locked, you may have a limited amount of leeway.
Consider changing the project schedule to make the best use of your team’s time without overworking them. In resource management, this process is known as resource leveling, a technique that is ideal when resources needed to complete a project are limited.
There are several ways to use resource leveling in your project. You could:
- delay start times
- extend the project duration
- remove tasks that aren’t crucial to project's completion
- split tasks up to reduce workload
- bring tasks forward
- do tasks in parallel using fast tracking
Reassign tasks
Your client’s website project is in progress when suddenly, one of your front-end developers is reassigned to a different project. In such cases, the ideal response is to redistribute the pending tasks to another team member who is available.
Take the Buzzfeed video post-production team, for example. They often handle two to three-week video projects, with new assignments frequently coming in. To prevent any delays, they use Float’s Schedule feature to identify team members who are available and have the right skills and then reassign the tasks accordingly.
Keep tabs on the who, when, and what with Float
Resource availability is constantly shifting and staying on top of it is crucial for successful project management.
It is only possible to stay on top of it using a tool like Float.
In Float, you have a comprehensive view of your team’s schedule. You can see the other projects a resource is working on and their planned time off. With our calendar integration, you can see meetings on their schedule.
In the case that someone is overloaded, you can easily detect it with the red overtime indicators. Resource utilization reports also show you when a team member has too much on their plate, and you can drag and drop tasks to reassign them to someone with more capacity.
Ready to accurately track your team’s resource capacity? Try Float for free today.
Some FAQs about resource availability
You can assess resource availability by conducting a thorough inventory of all relevant resources, including their quantities, schedules, and constraints. Tools such as resource management software can also help in tracking and visualizing resource availability.
Resource shortages can lead to delays in project timelines, cost overruns, decreased productivity, compromised quality, and missed opportunities. In severe cases, resource shortages may even result in project failure or organizational setbacks.
Effective communication of resource availability involves:
1. providing clear and timely updates on resource status
2. setting realistic expectations regarding resource availability and constraints
3. establishing channels for stakeholders to raise concerns or requests regarding resources
4. collaborating with stakeholders to find creative solutions to resource challenges
