Managing resources of your clinical trial projects the right way

November 8, 2021

As the business grows, it becomes critical to learn how to manage resources efficiently. Using Excel spreadsheets to track the utilization of available resources is no longer an option, especially if your company expands globally or conducts sophisticated projects with a lot of data points. 

Resource utilization allows you to monitor resources at your disposal and identify bottlenecks as they happen. 

FTE as a part of resource utilization

FTE is a metric to consider while speaking about resource utilization. It stands for full-time equivalent, which is the hours worked by a single employee on a full-time basis.

FTE helps to calculate the demand for future projects and the number of hours required to accomplish tasks and enhances the accuracy of capacity planning across projects. Unlike headcount, FTE considers the total number of full-time and part-time employees. 

For example, if your project demand is 5.5 FTE, you need five full-time workers and one part-time worker to complete the job.

Resource utilization: questions to ask

It is necessary to define in advance what resources the project will need over its lifetime – and here are the essential questions to consider:

• What tasks we need to accomplish? 
• During what period? 
• What functional department will be responsible for the project? 
• How many people do we need from that department? 
• Will these people be available considering other workloads? 
• Is it a distributed team spread across multiple countries?
• When is the peak workload expected? 

Resource utilization: features to consider

There are multiple solutions on the market that allow having the information about the project teams, country-specific budgets, and plans in one place.

However, to enhance your resource management capabilities, it is important to ensure that the system covers the following use cases:

• Possibility to store all information needed for planning in one single platform;
• Advanced management of the budgeted activities: connection to a specific employee, country, and timeline, changes in the distribution of budgeted hours and FTE, saving of the project, etc.
• Budgets and units (workload) planning tool to define how many team members are needed at certain time point;
• Possibility to see during the resource planning stage if the employee is already allocated to some other projects;
• Staff workload review within the project or in a cross-project mode to check who is overloaded and who is available;
• Deep analytics of data coming from multiple sources;
• Flexible notifications on reaching full FTE allocation and budget limits;
• Project data export. 

How Flex Databases helps optimize resource management

Flex Databases Project Management & Budgeting module provides you with transparent project management, team performance tracking, and comprehensive budgeting & expense reporting.

• You can plan tasks and allocate resources based on the data on various projects, profitability, what is lacking, what is done or must be accomplished, etc.
• Get a transparent picture of your team’s tasks and timelines. Draft, compare, import, export, update, and amend complex budgets and contracts in several clicks.
• Get instant reports on projects timing to plan and allocate resources, and so much more.

Upcoming FTE Utilization release sneak peek: 

• Employees’ workload can be tracked in the FTE Utilization Report: within a certain project or across all projects, available employees and busy ones.

• FTE Utilization Report shows cross-project data on the employees’ workload, available employees, and non-project activities. The Loaded filter can be used for a quick search of a potential project team member:

Want to learn more? Drop us a line at bd@flexdatabases.com.