Resource management is the process of planning and scheduling your team’s resources and activities—essentially anything that helps you complete a project. Developing a resource management plan can give you visibility into team member workloads. Learn how to manage resources and improve team performance. Making sure your team doesn’t feel overworked or underutilized is a challenge you’ll often face as a leader. It's easy to lose sight of your team's workload and bandwidth.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Like the ingredient list on a recipe card, a bill of materials (BOM) lists what's required to complete a project. Though typically used for product manufacturing, BOMs can benefit software developers, engineers, and even marketing and sales teams. In this guide, we’ll cover the different benefits, types, and best practices for writing your bill of materials.

An onboarding process is a structured approach to welcome new hires and set them up for success. When done right, onboarding helps new employees learn quickly, grow in their roles, and understand why their work matters. Learn about the benefits of great onboarding and how to achieve them, plus create your own onboarding process with four simple steps.

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) map out how your company or team performs a specific procedure or work process. You can use SOPs to improve communication and consistency among team members and make training easier for new hires. Read on to learn how to write an SOP. The most efficient teams have processes for everything, from best practices to naming company file folders. Teams perform these processes routinely and get better at them over time.

Timeboxing is a simple but efficient time management method where you set an allotted time to work on a task, then evaluate your progress afterward. This gives you valuable control over your schedule. Because the timeboxing technique is so versatile, you can apply it to both project management tasks and your day-to-day to-do lists. We’ve all had that 30-minute task that spirals out of control and takes up a whole day’s work.

A perceptual map is a chart used to illustrate where a product or brand and its competitors are positioned according to consumer perception. Learn how your brand can unlock industry insights through perceptual maps and identify paths into new marketplaces. When it comes to positioning your brand or product in the marketplace, consumer perception is king. But for marketers, it can be difficult to distinguish between your actual position and where you perceive yourself to be.

A business contingency plan is a backup strategy for your team or organization. It lays out how you’ll respond if unforeseen events knock your plans off track—like how you’ll pivot if you lose a key client, or what you’ll do if your software service goes down for more than three hours. Get step-by-step instructions to create an effective contingency plan, so if the unexpected happens, your team can spring into action and get things back on track.

Project managers and teams can struggle to make balanced resource allocation decisions, often opting for too much or too little. But the key to navigating this delicate balance is continuous adjustment and real-time responsiveness to project needs. This approach ensures that resources are optimally utilized, preventing both surplus and shortfall and steering towards project success with precision and efficiency. When you think of the most important elements of project planning, what comes to mind?