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Key takeaways 

• Resource optimization is not about getting your team to do more; it’s about helping them do their best work efficiently
• Optimization techniques like resource smoothing and leveling can help you manage available resources while keeping projects on track
• Tracking capacity and skills with resource management software supports informed decision-making on how to best utilize your team’s time

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For every resource or project manager who wants to run an efficient project, resource optimization is a must. 

But when the resources in question are people, not objects, resource optimization becomes a little more complex. Now, your ‘optimization’ involves:

• Scheduling your team’s time effectively across different projects 
• Balancing workloads to ensure no one is overburdened or underutilized
• Minimizing costs and avoiding wasting time by using resources efficiently
• Prioritizing critical tasks to ensure they are completed on time
• Identifying bottlenecks quickly to address issues before they impact the project

That’s a lot to handle all at once 😫

But! With the real-life examples, productivity-boosting techniques, and proven optimization tactics we’re about to share in this article, it’s not impossible. 

What is resource optimization?

Resource optimization is the process of allocating and using resources like time, people, and equipment as efficiently as possible to achieve project goals. 

Time and equipment work just fine in the context of this standard definition. But when you start talking about using people as efficiently as possible, something feels slightly off 😬 

Attempting to use or optimize humans in the same way you would a machine hurts your people and projects (and you probably won’t be the most popular person at the office party).

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Matt Smith

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Producer at Storm and Shelter

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Each person on your project team is more than just a resource. Treating people solely as assets to be arranged and used has a very real human cost. By acknowledging that we are all human, we can foster a more supportive and understanding way of scheduling our teams.

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For people-first managers and planners, resource optimization is not about getting your team to do more. It’s about making the most of their time (and skills) by assigning them to best-fit projects and establishing a supportive, collaborative environment that encourages them to excel.

Resource optimization in the wild: a real-life example

At global agency Scholz & Friends, the capacity planning team is responsible for optimizing how 200+ creatives spread their time across projects. 

Once a week, Head of Financial Operations and Capacity Management Maike Jahnens and Senior Capacity and Freelance Manager Comfort Agemo attend virtual meetings with stakeholders—specifically account managers and creative directors. 

Using their resource management tool, Float (hey 👋), they review their team members’ availability and allocations across their project portfolio to identify issues and assign people to projects. 

These weekly meetings, paired with a centralized resource management system, help them optimize resources in a few ways:

• Skill-based people tags assigned to team members in Float make it easy to filter people by skill, so they find the perfect person for project tasks in moments
• When team members with needed skills are unavailable, they can quickly make data-backed decisions, like lending a team member from their Hamburg office to help with a project in the Berlin office
• If team members across all offices have their plates full, they reach out to freelancers to work on projects 

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You have a list of everyone in every office. You know their skills and who speaks English or Spanish, and you can see that very quickly and help out if someone needs a specific skill set. 

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<pull-quote-author>Comfort Agemo, Senior Capacity and Freelance Manager at Scholz & Friends</pull-quote-author>

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Make the most of your team’s time with smart resource scheduling

Float gives you live insights into your team’s capacity and skill sets, allowing you to schedule them on the right projects and manage workloads so no one is overburdened or underutilized.

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How the best managers do people-focused resource optimization 

You can’t optimize what you don’t measure, so ‘step zero’ in this process is setting up a dedicated tracking system to stay on top of where every team member’s attention is focused now and in the future.

This involves creating profiles for each team member and inputting information like:

• Work days and hours: record each team member’s standard work days and hours, and include details like part-time schedules, flexible working hours, and any shift patterns
• Location: if you have a distributed team across different time zones, note the physical or virtual locations of each team member
• Time off: track planned vacations, regional holidays, personal days, and any other scheduled time off

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Pro tip: track your team members using a resource management tool

You might already be using a spreadsheet or a project management tool to track your resources—but spreadsheets are clunky and lack real-time updates, and most project management tools don’t give you insights into capacity. 

We recommend using a dedicated resource management tool (like Float! 👋) for a central view of projects, allocations, and capacity, so you always have visibility into whether your team is working optimally or not.

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Analyze your resources and look for patterns

Take a close look at how your team spends their time at work. Who is doing what, and for how long?

Pay attention to specific data trends. Metrics like resource utilization rates, scheduled hours, billable hours, and overtime can offer insights into your team’s performance. For example, consistent underutilization might indicate that a team member isn’t fully utilized, while high overtime might signal that others are overworked.

It helps to check regularly—this could be a quick daily look at the team schedule, followed by an in-depth look every week like the Scholz & Friends team. 

Look for inefficiencies and find the root cause 

Inefficiencies prevent your team from making the best use of their time, leading to wasted hours (or days, or weeks!) and missed due dates, which can negatively impact projects. 

Inefficiencies could show up as: 

• Consistently overloaded team members
• Team members who are constantly underutilized
• Team members spending time on low-value work
• Projects that are blocked and taking longer than expected
• Team members working on projects that don’t match their strengths

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Start by gathering information from those directly involved—speak with team members or their managers to gain insight into the situation. Ask open-ended questions to understand the root cause, and encourage honest feedback to identify any patterns or obstacles that might not be immediately obvious.

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Comfort Agemo

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Senior Capacity and Freelance Manager at Scholz & Friends

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When I notice a trend of a team member being passed over for tasks, I ask questions like, why are you always booking this person but not this person? What is the reason behind it? What can we do? What does the person need to learn? 

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Make adjustments using resource optimization techniques

1. Resource leveling

If you’ve ever delayed start times, extended the planned duration, or reduced the scope of a project, then you’ve done resource leveling ⚖️

Resource leveling is the process of adjusting the start and end dates of activities within the project to align with your available resources. This resource optimization strategy comes in handy when shared or essential resources have limited capacity or availability. 

💡 If you’re curious about other methods, learn about 5 resource management techniques that can help you meet project goals.

For example, you assign a four-hour task (pictured below in green) to a UX designer to complete within the first two days of an app development project. Everything is going fine until an urgent design task appears out of thin air (shown in pink). Now your UX designer is overbooked 🫠

To level their schedule, you can move the start date to day two, ensuring your designer is no longer overallocated. 

2. Resource smoothing 

Resource smoothing is a technique for adjusting the project schedule when there are time constraints. As the name suggests, it involves evening out timelines so that projects progress without a hitch. This could mean reallocating work to ensure activities meet their completion dates. 

Going back to our previous example, instead of moving the tasks for the UX designer forward, you might look for someone with similar skills and availability to work on the tasks until the UX designer’s schedule is clear. 

If your organization has multiple offices, you can also request that resources with the right skills be assigned to another team’s project for a specific period.

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Lauren O’Halloran

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Head of Production at Toaster

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When the need for extra resources arises, I can access the global team’s resources on an ad hoc basis. If the San Francisco office doesn’t have the bandwidth to take on a project, I can reach out to someone in a different office. Additionally, when we don’t have an illustrator, animator, or motion graphics specialist on the San Francisco team, we rely on the global team for those skills.

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3. Critical path method 

The critical path method is a technique used to identify the essential tasks that must be completed on time to ensure the entire project meets its due date. 

The sequence of these tasks, which takes the longest to complete, is known as the critical path. Any delay in these tasks will directly delay the project. 

This method helps you optimize resources by highlighting the activities to prioritize. It allows you to focus your team’s time and effort on dependencies that ensure project success.

For example, in a website development project, the critical path might be:

Requirement Gathering → Design Phase → Development → Testing → Client Review → Final Adjustments 

Any delays in these tasks would delay the entire project.

4. Modeling and simulation using tentative planning 

Tentative planning is the process of creating preliminary plans for projects or initiatives that have yet to be confirmed or approved. 

This resource optimization technique allows you to test whether future projects are feasible, assess how they will impact available resources and ongoing work, and determine the best way to allocate your people’s time across all projects. 

For example, you hear talks about incoming design projects, but you’re not quite sure if allocating resources to them will disrupt other ongoing or confirmed work. So you create a tentative project plan with placeholders for future hires or contractors needed for the project. In a tool like Float, it would look like this 👇 

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Angela Faunce

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Leaf Executive Producer of Integrated Production at Tilt Creative + Production

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Within Float, we have a number of ’Unassigned’ project resources we use as placeholders for projects that are still in the bidding stage, or not fully scoped or scheduled yet.‍ Similarly, for known repeats, we will book the appropriate folks but keep as ‘tentative’ until full details are known. An example of this might be recurring work around the holidays for a retail client.

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[fs-toc-omit] Make the best use of your team’s time 

Your people are your most valuable resource, and the best way to maximize their time at work is to enable them to do their best work. 

By thoughtfully assigning them to projects that align with their skills, helping them reprioritize when necessary, and maintaining balanced workloads while keeping capacity at optimal levels, you’ll have a happy, healthy, and efficient workforce. 

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Switch to a people-first resource management tool

With a live view of your team’s schedule, including details about resource availability, capacity, and skills, you can confidently make informed allocation decisions, ensuring your team can perform at their best.

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