The Pursuit Power Half Hour
Flexible by Design: How to Build Scalable Resource Models Without Burning Out Your Teams
How to Build a Centralized Resource Management Office Without Losing Flexibility
Centralized resource management helps professional services organizations establish consistent processes, improve staffing visibility, and connect capacity with business needs. A flexible Resource Management Office (RMO) combines shared governance with room for individual teams and business units to adapt.
In this Pursuit Power Half Hour session, Banoo Behboodi, Vice President of Enterprise Customer Success at Kantata, speaks with Julie Grove, Senior Manager of Resource Management at Anthology, about building a centralized yet agile RMO. Julie also explains how Anthology uses Kantata SX to support day-to-day resource management.
What Are the Foundations of a Centralized RMO?
The session identifies five core elements of a centralized and agile Resource Management Office:
- Trust and respect: Build relationships and understand team needs before introducing greater centralization.
- Maturity assessment: Evaluate each team’s resource management practices, readiness, and opportunities for improvement.
- Governance and feedback: Establish shared responsibilities and processes, with feedback from the teams using them.
- Measurement and monitoring: Use dashboards, KPIs, and regular reporting to guide decisions.
- Operational standardization: Create consistent practices while preserving appropriate flexibility for individual business units.
Banoo and Julie discuss how these foundations help organizations bring people, systems, and processes together without creating unnecessary rigidity.
How Can Resource Management Metrics Reveal Burnout Risks?
Resource managers need visibility into both planned work and actual workloads to identify potential staffing problems.
The conversation explores signals such as differences between forecasts and actuals, sustained overutilization, skill-to-work alignment, and billable versus productive time. Reviewing these measures helps teams recognize workload imbalances and investigate where staffing or planning changes may be needed.
How Does a Centralized Skills Database Support Staffing?
A shared skills repository helps organizations connect available capacity with the capabilities required for upcoming work.
Julie discusses why skills databases should prioritize quality over quantity. Relevant, current skills information gives resource managers a stronger foundation for evaluating staffing options and understanding whether available people have the capabilities projects need.
How Does Anthology Use Kantata SX for Resource Management?
In the final section, Julie explains how Anthology uses three Kantata SX capabilities to support resource visibility and assignment decisions:
- Resource Schedule: Provides visibility into actuals, current schedules, future forecasts, utilization, PTO, holidays, and other project assignments.
- Activity Assignment: Helps project managers review assigned resources and identify people who are overallocated across multiple projects.
- Assignment Search: Brings resource schedule and project plan information together to support resource assignment decisions.
These examples show how shared resource information can support consistent planning while helping teams respond to their day-to-day delivery needs.
Speakers
- Julie Grove — Senior Manager of Resource Management, Anthology
- Banoo Behboodi — Vice President, Enterprise Customer Success, Kantata
Explore Kantata’s resource management software to learn how connected resource information can support a more flexible Resource Management Office.