Agendamento de recursos na gestão de projetos

O que é agendamento de recursos?

Resource scheduling allocates assets to specific tasks and projects within a set timeframe. Depending on the industry, your resources could include team members, equipment, and facilities.

Everyone from team members to stakeholders has access to the resource schedule, which outlines time commitments and responsibilities throughout the project life cycle, ensuring there is no confusion.

For most projects, resource scheduling involves answering three questions:

• De quais recursos esse projeto precisa?
• Quando ele precisa desses recursos?
• Esses recursos estão disponíveis?

Answering these questions keeps everyone on track and prevents delays, as it allows project managers to identify exact resource requirements, time restraints, and availability. Effective resource scheduling is also a crucial component of effective time management, ensuring that your team utilizes available hours productively and meets project objectives.

Melhora a eficiência do projeto

Há várias maneiras de sabotar a eficiência do projeto, desde atribuir os recursos errados até delegar tarefas tarde demais. O agendamento de recursos permite que os gerentes vejam todo o escopo do projeto e o que cada projeto precisa.

Imagine que você precise do desenvolvedor sênior para trabalhar no aplicativo da empresa, mas não pratique o agendamento de recursos. Você pode esquecer que o desenvolvedor precisa colaborar com a equipe de finanças até que seja tarde demais, forçando você a alterar o cronograma do projeto.

Com o agendamento de recursos, você atribui todos os recursos e tarefas durante a fase de planejamento do projeto. Desse jeito, você não precisa se preocupar em corrigir conflitos de recursos.

Evita a superalocação de recursos

Suppose you have a senior developer working on a new app. Are they also working on the new website? What about the chatbot management that wants to launch at the same time? If the decision-making process only looks at when the developer is available, you might overload them.

Resource management lets you distribute work evenly to avoid burnout. You'll know if someone stretches themselves too thin or needs more work.

Preventing overallocation makes financial sense. If you have a faulty or nonexistent resource schedule, assigning too many resources to a project is expected. Extra resources add to the final bill and limit the team's ability to do other things.

Resource scheduling software stops overallocation. However, there may be a learning period. Assess your team’s average productivity to ensure equitable task allocation.

Melhorar os cronogramas e a entrega dos projetos

Garantir a utilização ideal dos recursos

Do you have team members sitting idle because their projects don’t fill the workday? Are team members working beyond their capacity? Resource scheduling shows how your team uses its resources and the results of that utilization.

You achieve optimal resource utilization when you extract the most productivity from your resources with minimal waste. Manually finding that balance is almost impossible, and without resource scheduling, you lose track of resources and their availability. This makes identifying under- or overutilized resources difficult and may cause you to struggle to assign roles effectively.

Resource scheduling showcases each team member's tasks in real-time, allowing you to quickly adjust when problems arise. For example, you can reassign a task to someone with more time and skills or rebalance your team’s capacity.

Types of resource scheduling

Different projects require different approaches to resource scheduling. Understanding when to use each method can help you pick the right strategy for your team’s needs.

The most common types of resource scheduling methods include:

• Time-based scheduling: This method focuses on specific time slots and deadlines for project execution. It involves assigning resources based on when tasks need to be completed rather than resource availability. Time-based scheduling is well-suited for projects with fixed deadlines, like product launches or marketing campaigns.
• Resource leveling: When you have limited resources but flexible deadlines, resource leveling helps smooth out workload peaks. This method adjusts project timelines to match your team’s capacity, meaning you might extend a project by a few weeks instead of overwhelming your best designer with three simultaneous campaigns.
• Resource smoothing: Unlike leveling, resource smoothing maintains your original project timeline while redistributing work within that timeframe. This approach works when deadlines are non-negotiable, but you need to balance team workloads, which may involve adjusting the timing of some tasks within the same project phase.

The complexity of your project typically determines which method is the best fit. Simple projects with clear timelines often need just time-based scheduling. Meanwhile, complex projects with multiple dependencies benefit from resource leveling or smoothing to prevent bottlenecks.

How to create an effective resource schedule for your next project

Creating a resource schedule that truly works involves more than just listing tasks. It requires a strategic approach to availability, skills, and project goals.

Here's how you can leverage Jira to tackle this challenge:

Step 1: Create a project

Begin by setting up your project in Jira, which lays the foundation for accurate scheduling and task management. This step establishes the framework that guides every scheduling decision. Choose a project template that aligns with your workflow, whether it's Scrum, Kanban, or a custom approach. This choice impacts how you visualize and manage your resource schedule throughout the project life cycle.

Step 2: Create Tasks for Your Project

Properly creating issues in Jira sets you up for accurate resource allocation. Use different issue types for various work: tasks for specific actions, epics for larger projects, stories for requirements, and bugs for problems needing fixes. Align task requirements with team members’ skills and experience. A senior developer might finish a complex integration in two days, while a junior developer needs a week. Your resource schedule should reflect these skill differences.

Step 3: Assess Resource Availability and Scheduling

Review calendars, current workloads, and planned time off to identify constraints affecting resource access. Visualizing work in Jira provides different perspectives on resource allocation. Jira’s board view displays issues in workflow steps, while the timeline view helps plan work, track progress, and map dependencies. These visual tools help identify problems before they derail your schedule.

Step 4: Monitor and Adjust Regularly

Track progress and reassign resources as needed when delays or changes occur. Jira offers data-driven reports and insights to help you see how projects evolve and priorities shift. Maintain open communication with the team through regular check-ins to identify problems early and make adjustments before they escalate. Jira's reports, combined with the timeline view, enable teams to effectively monitor how well their resource schedule aligns with actual project progress.

By following these steps and utilizing Jira's robust features, you can create an effective resource schedule that enhances project efficiency and ensures optimal resource utilization.

Desafios comuns da programação de recursos

In a perfect world, resource scheduling would be hiccup-free. Schedules would fall into place with little friction, and resources would always be available.

Teams frequently struggle with project constraints, varying scopes, and competing interests. For example, the content team wants to use your new freelancer to create website blogs, while the advertising crew believes new ad copy should come first. However, prioritization is a vital part of resource scheduling

Here are four common challenges teams encounter with resource scheduling:

Resolver conflitos e superalocação de recursos

Overallocation is often a team’s biggest problem. Simple resource scheduling usually prevents extreme cases of overallocation. However, this problem is more persistent than it seems.

Say you assign someone three concurrent tasks, each taking one-third of their workday. That doesn’t leave much wiggle room. If one project falls behind, the others will likely follow, leaving the worker stressed and scrambling to meet deadlines. Now, the team has a resource conflict.

You may not be able to eradicate overallocation problems with resource scheduling, but you can limit their occurrence by ensuring you have a resource management plan in place and watching for updates.

Lidar com habilidades e disponibilidade de recursos

Resource scheduling makes it easy to assign tasks, but what if someone isn’t available?

Resource leveling refers to shifting task due dates to accommodate limited resources. For example, if one designer needs to work on two ad campaigns, you can lengthen the project timeline instead of hiring another designer.

If you rely on spreadsheets and whiteboards, you may struggle to find the necessary information. An overview of who’s working on a particular project also won’t help when looking for specific skills or availability.

With an effective resource management software such as Jira, you can track each team member's schedule and abilities. This software allows you to spot potential bottlenecks before they grow and employ tactics such as resource leveling.

Gerenciar alterações e incertezas

Resource scheduling helps your project management team respond to changes, but it may not be enough if the schedule has limited space.

You may acquire a new client or see a team member exit for maternity leave. How do you fit this in if the schedule is full and you don’t have extra resources available? When things like this happen, you typically have three choices: pause a project, delay deadlines, or hire more help.

Using software makes changes more manageable. With Jira, you receive automatic change notifications, allowing you more time to determine the next steps.

Equilibrar diferentes projetos e prioridades

Everyone on your team has projects and priorities. Even if team member goals align, you still have to balance multiple projects, and resource scheduling doesn’t give you a key to determining priority.

While properly scheduling resources helps smooth out difficulties, it’s not the only solution. You may overlook individual motivations, making regular communication with your team critical. Asking for project updates and keeping your door open to feedback is critical.

This challenge becomes more complex when you're juggling different types of work. Your Gantt chart might show everything fits perfectly on paper, but the reality of context switching between projects can slow everyone down. Some team members thrive on variety, while others perform better with focused, single-project work.

Práticas recomendadas para programação de recursos

A programação eficaz de recursos é mais do que combinar pessoas e tarefas. Você precisa de estratégias que evitem cair nas armadilhas comuns que inviabilizam projetos e esgotam equipes.

Siga estas práticas recomendadas para programação de recursos:

• Inclua tempo extra no cronograma: evite ocupar cada minuto do dia com compromissos. As tarefas em geral demoram mais do que o esperado, emergências surgem e as pessoas precisam de tempo para respirar. Aloque tempo extra para a maioria das tarefas. Isso evita que uma tarefa atrasada atrapalhe todo o cronograma do seu projeto.
• Agende verificações regulares com sua equipe: reuniões semanais ou quinzenais ajudam você a descobrir problemas mais cedo. Evite reuniões longas, apenas o suficiente para revelar quaisquer obstáculos ou mudanças na disponibilidade. Os membros da equipe muitas vezes hesitam em falar sobre problemas até que eles se tornem crises, então crie espaços seguros para essas conversas.
• Use dados históricos para melhorar seu planejamento: acompanhe as tarefas para saber quanto tempo as tarefas e os projetos maiores levam de verdade, em comparação com suas estimativas. Depois de concluir alguns projetos, você vai ver padrões. Talvez suas análises de design sempre demorem o dobro do planejado, ou seus desenvolvedores concluam as tarefas de codificação mais cedo com consistência, mas precisem de mais tempo para testes. Use esses dados para fazer estimativas melhores na próxima vez.

O Jira centraliza todas as informações do seu projeto em um só lugar, oferecendo visibilidade unificada da alocação de recursos com funcionalidades como visualizações do cronograma, planejamento de capacidade e campos personalizados. Ao mesmo tempo, você pode usar o Jira Product Discovery para priorizar os projetos que demandam recursos antes de comprometerem o cronograma, garantindo alocação para trabalhos de alto impacto em vez de tarefas apenas urgentes.

Otimize sua programação de recursos com o Jira