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 utilization 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.
6 benefits of maturing your resource management function
1. Increased utilization
A lack of visibility into resource availability, siloed software and data, and different approaches to scheduling results in underutilized 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.
2. Optimal staffing
Optimal staffing decisions lead to increased utilization as well as better client outcomes, engagement quality, and employee satisfaction. The organized and effective processes prevent a culture of resource hoarding. With AI-powered scheduling, resource managers can work through recommended resource matches and utilize intelligent scheduling to build a big-picture, fully optimized plan.
3. Increased revenues and margins
Having firm-wide visibility into resource availability has an immediate impact on increasing utilization. It provides insights into pockets of both underutilization and overutilization, and it prevents resource hoarding through enhanced capacity planning. If your firm relies on delivery teams for resourcing instead of a centralized resourcing team, optimizing and streamlining the process results in a more efficient operation. This, in turn, frees up the chargeable time of fee-earners within these teams.
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Watch product videos4. Proactive engagement performance tracking
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.
5. Increased talent retention
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.
6. Improve strategic decision-making
Mature resource management systems use data not only to optimize 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 visualize what is happening in the firm and give your team the tools needed to make important decisions.
Take the first step in your resource management maturity journey
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, optimize outcomes, minimize risks, and ultimately optimize your firm’s growth. For an indication into how close or far your firm is to realizing these Stage 4 to Stage 5 benefits, Dayshape has created a resource management maturity quiz to help you assess which of the five stages of maturity your firm’s resource management function is currently at.
Find out where you are now. Take our interactive resource management maturity quiz.
