It is complicated dealing with large numbers of human resources and coordinating them across different locations, especially when they're moving around. It remains complicated even if you have spreadsheets and tables to support you. What's the alternative? Ideally when coordinating large numbers of mobile people across a project, organisation or campaign, one should use resource management software.
Spreadsheets become challenging because there is too much information to handle. It becomes challenging firstly tracking and recording people moving from one place, and then accordingly allocating them to different jobs, making sure everyone has the most up to date information. Ultimately it creates a lot of human error and confusion.
Let's take an example. Imagine you are working for a political party running campaign for an election period. You are coordinating a large campaign that has a lot of workers and volunteers that need to be coordinated on the ground across a multitude of electorates. There are many different roles that can need to be filled by volunteers, such as door knocking, distributing fliers, organising events, giving out voting cards and doing phone calls. Suppose you have a database of 5000 willing volunteers across the region, how will you coordinate them? Each person has a different set of preferences, experiences, skills, locations and level of commitment.
The solution is resource management software where you can create projects and allocate resources under the projects. Whether your human resources are your employees or volunteers, it is best to use strong resource scheduling software that enables to maximise the utilisation of your resources by allocating them in a way that recognises their diversity as human beings. Software that will be able to search people based on their preferences, experience, special skills, location, or past relationship with your organisation. So that when you call them and try to roster them, it can be done in a way that is beneficial to both parties involved.
Thus in the scenario outlined above, such software would firstly be able to hold profiles of each volunteer, record what they're preferences are, what their relationship has been with the organisation thus far, what electorate they live in. Secondly it would allow for very detailed searches so you can find out who can offer what skills and knowledge. Thirdly it should enable you to allocate people across projects and timelines so that one can easily view how many people are volunteering across which set of projects, locations, tasks and time. Fourthly it should keep a real time update so that anyone accessing the resource management system knows who is allocated where, and who is responsible for those allocations. Finally it should enable volunteers being able to input updates based on the work they do and the feedback they have.
This is great not only because it makes it much clearer and simpler to find, allocate and track volunteers for project organisers and volunteer managers, but it also enables higher management to track things from a bird's eye view. One can view how all the resources are being allocated and performing, who is managing what area, and can also get a granular view if they desire, such as profiles of all the individuals and productivity from each person. Finally one can get qualitative and quantitative data by having everyone document their experiences and hours worked so you can track resource work is going among the resources.
One such software SAVIOM Resource Scheduling Software that fulfils all these needs. Saviom is smart, easy to use software where managers can easily update information and search for resources across an organisation based on various criteria including skills, availability, location. Saviom has a simple drag and drop functionalities to be able to book resources, and intuitive communication that enables managers to know when volunteers, resources or members are overbooked. Furthermore, the software can be tailored to each specific organisation based on their objectives, processes and problems.
So in an election campaign, such software can create great data about how many voter contacts there are, the type of responses from the public, the number of people mobilised and the impact one can have during such an influential period!
Author Resource:
SAVIOM is market leader in Resource Scheduling Software . This software is quite affordable and easy to use.