Resource management is a topic we have explored in depth in our past articles.  The reason that I have written so extensively on the subject is that I as a career team leader and manager have seen firsthand the important role it plays in a business's success or failure.  Businesses can see amazing growth and prosperity if their leadership makes prudent resource management decisions and employs intelligent strategies.  Conversely, otherwise strong businesses with excellent products and capable team members can be brought to their knees if their leadership fails to carry out effective resource management strategies.  As a refresher, resource management is the application of and planning of the application of resources at the disposal of a business.  These resources encompass everything from team member skillsets like the expertise of an engineer to tangible assets like the use of a piece of machinery.  The practice is very much logistical in nature and is predicated upon strong analytics.  The goal of resource management is to apply an institution's resources effectively to solve that institution's problems.  Resource management also includes resource development, but that's a topic for another day.  As you may remember from past entries time allotment is one of the key pillars of resource management and is probably the most recognizable step for the layman.  Resource booking, our topic for today, is time allotment in practice and entails planning exactly what resource will be used to solve a problem and for how long.  In this article, I’ll be exploring just why effective resource booking should be an ever-present goal for modern business.

The first and most obvious reason to create a resource booking strategy is to ensure that mistakes arent made in planning, such as double booking or over-application of resources.  Booking is a way to ensure that a business doesn’t cross its wires in a way that will be detrimental.  Team members are not capable of and should not be expected to, for lack of a better term, freestyle planning of the operation of a business, so it is important that leadership provides them with the tools and strategies necessary to effectively book.  Failing to do so leaves time and money on the table.  Booking strategies and processes protect the business from unnecessary waste and damaging failures by providing your team with a way to make sure things will be done right when the time comes to actually apply the resources in question.

Resource management, like so many areas in business, is made better with strong analytics.  We all intuitively understand that learning from past mistakes and successes is a core function of improvement, and the same principle applies here.  Analysis of the effectiveness and efficiency of resource application is a surefire way to improve future applications and can be facilitated by a strong booking process.  If a business responds reactively to its needs without planning in advance and documenting its planning process,  it will hamstring its ability to learn from those applications because the relevant data will only exist in the minds of the team rather than in a centralized place.  For example, if a construction company is tasked with paving a given stretch of road, and its management arbitrarily sends two paving machines which turn out not to be enough for the task without planning and documenting through a centralized booking strategy, their failure will not be readily available as a data point to analyze for future reference.  The idea of booking is to set logistical decisions in stone in order to be able to refer to them in the future.  This booking process is also useful for compliance purposes and creates a record that is easy to search through and refer to.

A sound booking strategy also eliminates the often frustrating and confusing elements of logistical practices by providing team members with an easily approachable and centralized resource planning method.  This ease of operation along with the reduction of planning missteps is a powerful way to improve morale internally and reduce image damaging mistakes externally (in the eyes of the consumer).  Providing team members with a way to do things right the first time, thereby eliminating the hurdles of correcting, benefits everyone from the owner to employee.

There are a variety of reasons why resource booking is an important consideration in resource management and by extension in business generally.  As you have read, efficiency, analysis, and morale all benefit from sound booking strategies and are likely the primary reasons why a business would be motivated to take a look at its current workflow.  As you can imagine, resource booking is a very involved and often complex task, so many powerful digital tools have been made to facilitate the process.  In my next article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the various available tools and taking a good look at Sharepoint, our preferred tool here at infowise, and the program we’ve built our business around.  If you have any questions regarding resource booking or management, please feel free to reach out to us here at Infowise or browse our extensive documentation. While reviewing these introductory articles, please take a look at the technical resources that our team has created to help you better manage your resources. Thanks for stopping by, and see you in the next one.