Originally featured in AIT.
In the dynamic landscape of the accountancy industry, optimizing growth is a constant pursuit for firms seeking sustained success. An often overlooked function that plays a pivotal role in achieving this goal is resource management. The effective allocation and utilisation of people significantly impacts a firm's efficiency, client and employee satisfaction, and profitability. Therefore, improving or (as we like to call it) maturing your firm’s resource management function is imperative to stay ahead of the competition.
A lack of visibility into resource availability, siloed software and data, and different approaches to scheduling results in underutilised resources. Using a dedicated resource management solution that consolidates engagement and resource data in one place enables efficient, balanced allocation of work on a large scale, with full visibility of resource availability and suitability.
Optimal staffing decisions lead to increased utilisation as well as better client outcomes, engagement quality, and employee satisfaction. The organised and effective processes prevent a culture of resource hoarding. With AI-powered scheduling, resource managers can work through recommended resource matches and utilise intelligent scheduling to build a big-picture, fully optimised plan.
Having firm-wide visibility into resource availability has an immediate impact on increasing utilisation. It provides insights into pockets of both underutilisation and overutilisation, and it prevents resource hoarding through enhanced capacity planning. If your firm relies on delivery teams for resourcing instead of a centralised resourcing team, optimising and streamlining the process results in a more efficient operation. This, in turn, frees up the chargeable time of fee-earners within these teams.
Mature resource management functions empower teams to make strategic decisions by providing visibility into real-time engagement performance. By bringing operations and finance together in one system, resourcing decisions are aligned with margin and other engagement goals. In addition, engagement managers receive real-time, configurable alerts if engagements are going off track. This ability to track and monitor actuals against the budget is not possible in less mature firms with siloed finance and scheduling systems.
Maturing your resource management function leads to proactive planning through the creation of stable and well-balanced workloads. Adopting firm-wide allocation opens doors to diverse learning and development opportunities and the integration of modern, user-friendly technology makes work an enjoyable experience. Together, these aspects collaboratively foster a people-centric environment that aligns operational activities with the career aspirations of employees, encouraging them to remain with the firm and flourish in their professional journey.
Mature resource management systems use data not only to optimise resource allocation but to provide reports powered with real-time data to assist with operational decisions and strategies. With reliable engagement management information and reporting in one place, or exported to a system like Power BI, it’s easy to visualise what is happening in the firm and give your team the tools needed to make important decisions.
Maturing your resource management will boost your firm's performance and for firms aiming to thrive, it’s a crucial route to achieving success. Improving your resource management function empowers you to expedite decision-making, optimise outcomes, minimise risks, and ultimately optimise your firm’s growth. For an indication into how close or far your firm is to realising these Stage 4 to Stage 5 benefits, Dayshape has created a resource management maturity guide to help you assess which of the five stages of maturity your firm’s resource management function is currently at.