IT Resource Management: Why It Is A Key To Business Success

Last Updated on December 31, 2024

To achieve success with your project, you should pay close attention to how you manage your IT resources. If these are allocated correctly, it is easier to stay within budget, maximize the productivity of your employees or teams, and, most importantly, – deliver a high-quality project on time.

However, managing these resources effectively takes time and a lot of effort. Well, let’s look at it this at a bit different angle, the consequences of not managing your IT resources or managing them poorly could include: exceeding the budget, delays with release dates, and general waste of resources. Aren’t the effects of poorly managed resources more daunting than the actual process of taking care of your resources?

What does resource management mean? 

The clue is in the name here, it is the process of choosing where and how to manage effectively the tools, your teams’ time, and budget. The main purpose is to be strategic and allocate these resources in a way that will help you achieve the best possible results for your projects.

By being aware of which resources are best suited for which task to achieve maximum efficiency, you guarantee yourself project success and an environment where productivity along with efficiency thrive. However, keep in mind that in order to manage these resources efficiently you need a good understanding of your organization, and how it operates.

What IT resources do you need to manage? 

When dealing with resource management, it is important to not look at them as one. You should be aware of the specific resources that you have at your disposal, and then monitor how your allocation decisions make your resources affect each other. These resource management techniques are key to the success of your current and future projects.  

Technological resource management 

Since we live in a world dominated by technology and innovation, tech is a critical resource. There are always new apps, tools, platforms, and features coming out. You need to be up-to-date with current trends in IT as well as with any arising cyber threats.

Efficient IT resource management covers: software, hardware, and digital assets. The main focus here should be on which tools and technologies would best support your organizational business objectives. Once you do that your technological assets support all of your other resources and departments, whilst helping you to stay innovative.

Read more about best practices for picking up DevOps and project management tools:

📌 How To Enhance DevOps Productivity: Project Management and Team Collaboration Tools
📌 The Most Popular Continuous Monitoring And DevSecOps Tools For Building An Effective Security Strategy
📌 How To Boost Your Code Efficiency: Build And CI/CD Tools

Human resources 

Your employees are your key valuable asset. Your teams should have clearly defined roles and tasks, the ability and infrastructure to communicate clearly and effortlessly.

Moreover, there should be pieces of training, both professional and security.

Time management 

Effectively managing time resources in your project means meeting deadlines and sustaining productivity across teams. As a PM, you often have to stick to project schedules, or even manage multiple projects at the same time – therefore you should take advantage of project management tools such as Atlassian’s Jira.

Other things include appropriately prioritizing tasks, careful planning, and constant monitoring of all the processes. Proper time management can greatly improve your company’s success, after all releasing your projects on time is one of the most important things; moreover finishing on schedule and properly managing your time resources can help you to stay within the budget too. 

Financial resource management 

To manage your organization’s financial resources, you need to focus on three key elements: cost control, budgeting, and financial forecasting. This way you can guarantee an optimal distribution of your financial assets across relevant and appropriate departments in your company.

As a result, you increase your organization’s revenue and avoid potential waste of resources – this way you make space for other resources to be used to your advantage. Provided that your organization sticks to your defined financial strategy, budgeting and so on, all of your other assets will be positively affected and it will be easier to invest in them, support their overall growth, and stay on top of the business priorities. 

How you benefit from effective IT resource management 

Managing your organization’s resources well allows you to use your resources while maximizing efficiency. This brings in a number of advantages that contribute directly to your organization’s success. Let’s take a closer look. 

Better security

Proper resource management positively impacts the overall security across your organization. Therefore, if you invest in the technological aspects of your company and your infrastructure, systems, and security practices are on point, your risk management can be a lot more effective. You are also less likely to get affected by any breaches or data loss scenarios, such as ransomware.  

In terms of resource planning, when allocating resources, make sure that your organization undergoes audits regularly to stay compliant with industry standards. This way you can build trust with your stakeholders, customers, and potential partners.

Also, monitor the security practices, use tools that allow you to get instantly notified if any unauthorized access or any new unknown devices try to connect to your network. By doing that you detect problems quickly and therefore can deal with them just as quickly.

The last thing worth mentioning is the need for strict access controls. Try to stick to the principle of least privilege – an individual should only be able to access the applications, environments, data, and resources that they require in order to complete their tasks.

Lowered costs & higher profits 

Ideally, you should guarantee that your resources have this “symbiotic relationship” in which if every individual resource is properly distributed, their benefits will positively affect each other. Now, if you manage your resources strategically and effectively you can reduce your project costs. Optimize the use of all of your resources in a way where every decision and action has a clear purpose behind it and does not contradict any other processes. 

Informed decision making 

To start off, better resource management equals better decision-making. If you have access to extensive knowledge about your company and comprehensive data along with insights you can make decisions based on that, which will complement the main objectives of your business. 

Improved transparency  

Keeping track of all processes when managing resources is key. Take note of resource usage – what resources are being used for what purposes, how much you can spare for other objectives, where you may need additional resources, and so on. This kind of transparency in resource management supports your security, aids thoughtful decision-making, and helps to lower costs as well as maximize the value of any investments.

However, there is more – proper transparency in human resources not only increases accountability but also allows you to measure the efficiency of your teams, find where and why any mistakes were made to keep continuously improving. 

Challenges you have to deal with 

Despite its importance and key benefits, resource management involves identifying obstacles that you will have to deal with in order to move forward with full efficiency. 

Security threats and technological advancements 

To start off, IT is a rapidly growing field, there are constant innovations, new apps, and improved workflows. However, with these great advancements comes a certain downside – newer and more dangerous cyber threats. You should make sure to have access to information regarding local as well as global security updates and changes to be aware of which areas of your overall security might need upgrades. This way, you can also stay ahead of your competition.

It is important to take security seriously in terms of resource management and distribution. Poorly allocated resources for security can result in vulnerabilities across your systems, networks, and the organization as a whole, which opens all doors for cyber criminals to exploit these weaknesses. As we mentioned before, to deal with these challenges, you should implement strict access control mechanisms, educate your staff, undergo regular audits, add monitoring tools, and invest in a backup and DR solution. Moreover, effective IT resource management requires continuous monitoring of IT resources to make sure that they are performing well.

Tracking, reporting, and communicating 

Without clear communication, regular reports, and being able to get insights into your resources – tracking becomes rather difficult. So, you need to find ways to guarantee that your teams can communicate as well as collaborate effectively and implement tracking and reporting mechanisms. The ability to track how and where the resources are being used and verify if the processes are effective is crucial. Not having these tracking and reporting mechanisms in place can result in issues with measuring the progress of your project, the resource utilization and the amount of return on investment in terms of your resource allocations.

Thanks to these tracking mechanisms you can also identify resource gaps, which further supports your resource management plans.

Poor visibility, collaboration, and resource allocation 

Let’s point out that if you do not have a comprehensive view of all of your resources it can result in a lack of efficiency, underutilization, and improper allocation of resources. Now, if you have a clear understanding of your entire organization, resource management can help to allocate resources in a more informed manner. So, you can see resource availability, schedule resources, and complete projects on time.

Moreover, if you do actually have a holistic view of your resources but do not have the right person to manage them or there aren’t any appropriate management techniques in use, things like resource conflicts (different teams fighting for the same resources) could delay the releases of your projects and generally have a negative impact on workflows.

But, on the other hand, if you have proper management along with a holistic view of your resources, the next step closely linked to resource management is collaboration. Managing resources usually includes the collaboration of various departments of your organization. Therefore, you should make sure to facilitate and encourage open and clear communication, so that your teams can collaborate effectively, share resources, and report back to the management or a resource manager with relevant, valuable insights. 

Budget constraints 

Another challenge that’s worth mentioning is budgeting. The issue here is that we want the best possible resources out there for greater business development but, at the same time, we have a budget plan that we have to stick to. Since these cutting-edge solutions often have a higher price tag and the budget cannot be exceeded, there must be a different way. What you or your project managers should do is prioritize your investments well and then identify a cost-effective solution for your business with a clear purpose. By doing so, you can make the most out of your financial resources while still maintaining quality and being innovative. 

Jira for project & resource management 

Jira is one of those tools which can help you to streamline your project’s resource management processes. It’s a flexible tool for tracking issues and projects, one of its main capabilities is that it allows you to customize workflows. This, as a result, lets you customize workflows specifically to meet the requirements of the project.

Another thing that Jira helps with is planning the distribution of tasks, you can do that according to your team members’ skills and their availability, this way your employees will be more productive. Finally, you will get real-time reports and have access to information regarding the progress of your project, resource utilization, and that will further support your decision-making along with effective resource management. 

Secure your Jira 

To further support your business objectives and proper resource management make sure to keep your Jira well-protected. Backup and disaster recovery tools for Jira can guarantee that your data is available during outages, and always recoverable.

Features such as granular restore or point-in-time restore are crucial to avoid losing data in the case of a ransomware attack and guarantee that you do not have to pay any form of ransom, which is usually huge. How to withstand any disaster scenario? Build your Disaster Recovery strategy effectively.

Summary 

With efficient resource management, you can achieve significantly more in less time. When you have a clear view of your IT resources you can allocate them more effectively. Moreover, good resource management can improve your productivity since you will be aware if any area of your assets is missing anything. Essentially, well-managed resources bring you a vast amount of benefits, from better decision-making to cutting costs and better customer satisfaction. But most importantly it ensures successful project completion, supports all of your business objectives, provides a guarantee of long-term prosperity, and helps to maintain a competitive edge in the modern fast-paced market.

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