Project management means skilfully managing resources.

Of course, leadership, communication and crisis management also play a major role, but ultimately it’s all about how and where you deploy your resources. If you are well versed in project management resources, you are well on your way to becoming a respected project manager with a holistic leadership style.

In this article, you will learn about the different project management resources and how you can manage them with monday.com.

However, if you are new to the topic of resource management and would like to know the definition first, you are welcome to read our previous blog post on the subject.

What are resources in project management?

This simple definition can be applied to many assets, from copy paper to employee morale. It therefore makes sense to categorise them. A common method of categorising resources is to divide them into tangible and intangible resources.

• Material resources are tangible objects in the real world. Examples include employees, facilities, vehicles, equipment and hardware. Software is also regarded as material. Although you can’t touch it, it physically exists in your computer’s memory.
• Intangible resources are assets that you cannot touch or precisely localise. Examples include energy, morale, time and information.

However, the distinction between tangible and intangible assets is not always clear-cut.

Money is an interesting example. Is it material because it is a finite asset represented by numbers? Or is it immaterial, because money is a currency that derives its value solely from the word of the government?

This is why many people decide to further subdivide project resources into seven categories: People, Information, Materials, Tools, Energy, Capital and Time.

Why is it important to manage your project resources well?

The role of a project manager can be quite ambiguous. No two project managers approach their tasks in the same way. Even within the same company, the role can vary from team to team.

Why is waste bad?

Everything a company does should ultimately create added value for the customer. If you waste resources, you can pass on less to the end user.

Waste also means that you are not fully utilising the benefits available to you and are therefore falling far short of your goals.

Wasting money, for example, means that your company has to find additional sources of funding in order to survive. As a result, you spend more time looking for investments and paying off debts and less time doing what you’re really good at.

Inefficient management of employee morale means that your team members are not utilising their full capacity.

If you waste the power of your hardware and software, it’s much more likely that your project will fall behind schedule. The possible examples – and consequences – are endless.

Intelligent resource planning is so important that some of the more complex projects have their own resource manager. The project manager distributes tasks, while the resource manager creates a plan with optimal allocations.

They also deal with resource forecasting, the art of predicting future demand.

In other projects, the allocation of resources is left to the project manager.

Regardless of who manages the project management resources, one thing is certain: there will come a time when difficult decisions will have to be made about limited resources.

How can you be sure at this point that you are making the best decision?

There is only one way: by always having as much resource planning information to hand as possible.

The best way to achieve this is by setting up customised workflows that automatically provide you with this information.

monday.com can help you with this. In the next section, we’ll show you exactly how it works for each of the 7 most important project management resources.

What are the 7 project management resources?

Project resources can be divided into seven categories: People, Information, Materials, Tools, Energy, Money and Time.
In this section, we’ll define each of these categories and show you how monday.com can help you create a resource plan to manage them.

1. People

This is about the members of your team who complete each task.
This category is in first place for good reason. The people in your team have the greatest influence on the success of your project.
You can have the best software, the most comfortable offices and the most money, but without a competent team your project will go nowhere. To put it another way: If you want to waste the other six categories, hiring an inefficient team is the quickest way to do it.

When putting together a team, you collect a lot of data about your applicants: not only where they are in the selection process, but also who they are and what makes them special.

With this information, you can customise your recruitment dashboard on monday.com, which will automatically update charts, timelines, databases and more.

2. Information

Information is the necessary knowledge to master any task.
A team without clear information is groping in the dark, and that rarely leads to good results. Your team members will bring a lot of the basic information you need, including how to use your tools and how to work within your organisation’s processes.

The difficult part is the project-specific information, which is crucial and can change quickly. Working on a project step that has already been discarded is a waste of time. To avoid this, you can pin important updates to your dashboard in monday.co, so that everyone stays up to date.

3. Materials

“Materials” refers to all physical things that are needed to complete a task, apart from pure energy.

For most software development teams, there are not many materials, except perhaps a lot of paper for notes or coffee. This category is more relevant for traditional project teams such as construction teams. Here too, monday.com offers suitable templates.

Die construction management template is ideal for managing multiple construction sites. You can use it to track schedules, subcontractors, material consumption and more.

4. Tools

Tools are tangible resources that are needed to complete the project but are not consumable, unlike materials. In the technical world, a further distinction is made between hardware and software.

Good software is essential for every project team, especially for those who develop software. To manage these resources effectively, you need to integrate them closely into your workflows.

5. Energy

This is the power required to operate your tools and work environment. In the past, this might have been wood or coal, but today it is usually electricity. Wasting energy is a common problem. Typical examples include leaving computers or lights on unnecessarily.

6. Money

Money is often the first thing people think about when it comes to project resources. It is the key to overcoming bottlenecks as long as the budget is not exhausted. Managing your budget from day one is crucial. The marketing budget template from monday.com can help by allowing anyone to keep track of spending.

TheMarketing budget template from monday.com is an example of a dashboard that you and your entire team can use to keep track of how much money is being spent.

The more people understand the expenditure, the more everyone will be in favour of using the money wisely.

7. Time

Time is a limited resource. We talk about “spending” them. Good time management is crucial for the success of a project. Whether you use agile project management, the waterfall method or another methodology, creating an efficient schedule is one of the first steps.

With the extendedProject management-template from monday.com gives you complete insight into all the important areas of your project and ensures that nothing falls behind.

How can you manage your project resources?

So far, we’ve talked a lot about monday.com’s apps and templates that you can use to track various project management resources. But that’s only part of the story.

With monday.com’s work operating system, you can bring all these tools – and more – together in one central dashboard. When you update a database, the entire database is automatically updated.

Because adding new information is so easy, you’ll never lose track of an important resource again.

Find out more in our blog post:

Conclusion

Resources are the basic building blocks of project management. If project management were a sport, then the management of project resources would be the basis – like dribbling, which you have to practise before you can shoot. Every aspect of project management revolves around resources, from budget management to motivating your team members through strong leadership.

And information plays a key role in every aspect of managing project resources. Schedule a demo with us today and find out how you can optimise the distribution of your project management resources with monday.com.