The Secret to Team’s Success: Smart Allocation

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to leading a team is making sure that your tasks and team members are correctly allocated.

A question of judgment and skill, it’s important to make sure that you understand the needs of the project and the skill set of your team so that you can create a stable work breakdown structure. One thing you want to avoid for sure is over utilization, which may further lead to job burnout.

Managing proper staff levels, and keeping track of their progress is the best way to ensure that your teams continue to grow and thrive and you don’t find yourself in the difficult position of constantly needing to recruit new employees. Correctly allocated stuff means a lot. First of all, it will boost team morale, which further leads to an increase in their productivity. What are the pitfalls to watch out for when it comes to correctly allocate staff?

Incorrectly Assessing the Project Tasks

Before you consider allocating anybody to do anything on a project, it’s vital to understand the tasks that make up the project. Failing to do this can lead to incorrectly covering the right areas and missing deadlines.

Typically, a project will need you to complete tasks in a specific order. So before you get started, as yourself these questions:

What are all the tasks that make up this project?

• Which tasks are dependent on each other?
• What deadlines apply to each task?
• What does my team member require in order to get the task done?

Incorrectly Assessing your Team’s Skills

A a successful project, just like a successful team, is the combination of skill and confidence in the abilities of each team member. But failing to recognize the individual skill sets and competencies of your team can leave you with gaps that cause unhappy team members and delayed deadlines.

It’s important to use the best person for the job, and just as essential that you can keep track of the growth and development of team members. EmployPlan can help take the guesswork out of this by giving you a snapshot of each team member, their progress, learning, and development.

This way you can see that you’re utilizing the team for their strengths, while also providing enough of a challenge and opportunity for members to grow.

Failing to Communicate to your Team

An an engaged team is a motivated team. So if you’re making unclear choices or poor decisions, your team is less likely to work to its full potential.

Consider engaging your team when it comes to providing the skills for specific projects. Do you have people wanting to develop skills, or learn something new before the project? Have they just completed training on a skill they’d like to now work with?

Asking and communicating with your team is one of the easiest ways to boost morale while showing that you care about their development as people. EmployPlan lets you see the availability of your team, as well as their learning and development. Factoring all of these elements into your plan can help you to cultivate a world-class and high-performing team.

Allowing your team members to have input in how they work and what they work on also allows your team members to trust each other, and respect the diversity of their skills and experience. By handling this correctly, you’ll find that your team is motivated and enthusiastic about the delivery.

Allocating workforce with EmployPlan

Avoiding all the pitfalls we mentioned above may be tricky. Knowing your company’s resources lets you make the correct allocation decisions, and EmployPlan makes it easier than ever.

In In the example is shown below, you can see that I got wrongly allocated. Although I am an Angular Developer, I lack a lot of skills needed for this project. Rochus, by contrast, fits the project needs very well. Let’s move him over this slot, and place me for a 50% slot. You can still see that I need to learn Vue.js to be able to work with maximum productivity. It’s a great way to indicate which employees need upskilling.

Maybe it’s time to send me to a Bootcamp?

Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

Fundamentally, if you want to enjoy the benefits of a happy team delivering their best work, you need to understand how to manage your team and manage your projects.

Well managed teams and well-managed tasks require the right work breakdown structure and project management tools so that you can fully understand the project the process from beginning to end — and can jump in and correct any problems before they become an issue for your team or your project delivery.