Resource management

Blue Ant: Your resource planning tool for transparency and overview

Resource planning and resource management are two of the supporting pillars of every successful multi-project management. Only if you have a transparent overview of your employees' workload can you reliably set up your projects and implement them without delays. With Blue Ant's resource planning tool, you always have an up-to-date picture of all your important resource types:

• Specific tangible resource: "I absolutely need Mr Maier with his many years of experience in the field of X for my project team".
• Your virtual resources / undetermined specific resource: "I need one person for my project team. Their skills are not crucial."
• Your team resources / certain unspecified resources: "I need someone from X department for my project team, who exactly is not critical."

Team resources are particularly important for realistic resource planning. As project manager, you can plan freely with them at a very early stage of the project without having to think about exactly which people you need at this point.

The resource screen in Blue Ant provides clarity

You can see the resources required for all upcoming and ongoing projects in Blue Ant's resource screen. As a resource manager, you can see at a glance which projects in which departments and which teams have staff requirements and which skills or specific employees are needed.

From this, you gain a valuable overview of the resource management because often you do indeed have enough free resources spread across the company. It’s only in certain areas and departments that there are regular problems, for example if there are enough controllers but not enough software developers. It also often happens at the department level that you have enough employees, but the one person with special expertise never seems to be available.

With Blue Ant, you can identify such imbalances at an early stage. This gives you a decision-making basis for prioritising the projects to be implemented. Our software helps you to see your multi-project landscape from above down to the finest detail.

Resource planning with Blue Ant - Find the right resource and plan ahead

To find the right resources for the project, our tool for knowledge management in your teams is a valuable aid. Identify specific competences and skill sets in your workforce and request the appropriate staff members with just a few clicks.

You can simulate the best-case scenario of an uninterrupted project using the project simulation tool. In the event of unexpected illness or other unforeseeable variables, you can precisely reschedule your resource planning and make new decisions based on the current status during ongoing project operation.

As you know, the proper management of your resources has a decisive influence on your project plan. Can you keep to the planned time and cost framework? Without regular controlling, you will quickly find yourself struggling in the complex project landscape of multi-project management.

Blue Ant helps you to conduct stringent and regular resource controlling. This way you recognise early on whether your plans still correspond to reality or whether the foundations on which you are making your decisions are crumbling! This helps you avoid starting new projects early, while other important projects are delayed. Otherwise, successful project completion is barely achievable even with the best resource planning at the start.

Blue Ant helps you:

• As a team leader, to recognise at an early stage whether sufficient resources are available or whether certain resources are overloaded.
• As a project manager, you always have an overview of the resources allocated to you. With our controlling, you can see directly whether you are using your resources correctly, over-scheduling or even have free resources that you can free up again.
• As a manager, you need regular evaluations to understand how much effort is being expended on which projects. Do the amounts of effort turn out as planned by you and your resource management? Or is the effort developing in a different direction? If so, it's time to intervene.

Imagine you have decided that 50 percent of your effort will be put into the digitalisation of your company in the next two years. After six months, your controlling shows that only 10 percent of the capacities of your resources have actually flowed into this topic. At this point, your entire multi-project management is almost certainly on the wrong track. Blue Ant helps you to steer a new course.

In addition to complex evaluations, Blue Ant's resource management also allows you to compile ad-hoc evaluations with just a few clicks. Create these as regular automated reports on your resources, their utilisation and work. From graphic to tabular evaluations, from analyses and evaluations with Word to the automatic dispatch of reports to a specific group of recipients - with Blue Ant you can implement the controlling of your resources according to your individual needs and on the basis of secure data.

Speaking of data: Controlling needs data. And data needs Blue Ant. If you do not enter all data directly in Blue Ant, you can use the various predefined interfaces of Blue Ant. Availability, absence and work-time data can either be managed directly in Blue Ant or easily imported via interfaces from your HR software, your ERP tool or from other third-party solutions.

With Blue Ant as a central hub for resource planning and management, you prevent duplicate data stocks and data that is never synchronised. This saves you a lot of work - and costs! Even if an employee changes departments within your company, Blue Ant receives this information from your HR system and so this person can be reliably included again as a resource in your project planning.

A final note: Our Blue Ant project management software is of course always compliant with the EU Data Protection Regulation and only includes data in its database that is of legitimate interest.