When it comes to resource management, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in the minute details. Room scheduling, human resource allocation, as well as IT, inventory and production resource management.
But sometimes it’s valuable to take a step back and really understand the idea of resource management. Strictly defined, it is the “efficient and effective deployment for an organization’s resources when they are needed.” Most often, resource management is tied into project management philosophy, techniques, and tools for functional and cross-functional resource allocation.
It can also often be understood on the corporate level, as companies attempt to distribute resources across departments in the most efficient way possible. (Think about the process you must go through to request a new template from your design department.) There is also “resource leveling,” or the technique of reducing both excess inventories and shortages in order to keep your stock of resources smooth and with stored capacity, with the idea of having an even amount of supply and demand and achieving 100% utilization.
But what about a different kind of resource management? The kind that simplifies the resources you already have on hand and makes them more valuable to your organization? Not through optimization, or even via capacity improvement. We’re talking about organization and accessibility.
Let’s take a step back. Have you ever heard of this quote?
“Deliver us, Allah, from the sea of names.” – Abu Nasr al-Farabi
It’s a beautiful quote, and it sums up the difficulty that many of us have today: There’s just too much information. Every day, we are overwhelmed by our possibilities. At Starbucks, there are a seemingly infinite amount of coffee choices. In the workplace, when you’re scheduling meetings, there are various people to select, rooms to choose from, and various in-room resources you might require. With that much information — and that much choice — you need a solid meeting room management system.
And, especially with Meeting Room Manager, which can layer on top of Microsoft Outlook, it doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. In resource management, we often talk of the technique of investing in resources that can be retained by a smaller additional investment to develop a new capability that is demanded, at a lower investment than disposing of the current resource and replacing it with another that has the demanded capability. That’s what Meeting Room Manager does! You don’t have to start over, but rather make the incremental investment in the product to add that needed capability.
If you don’t, you do face the danger of being buried under the sea of information. Remember what happened to the medieval philosophers? They had to start inventing new terminology to speak of the thought processes they were inventing, and it became so convoluted that it became customary to read commentaries on philosophical works, not the original — just for the sake of understanding the information!
