Anna Balyuk 
There’s hardly any area of business where people aren’t involved. If you run a company, human resource management is one of the paramount directions of your activities. People have their own affairs, fall ill, take sick leaves, days off, and long vacations. And it’s a natural workflow, you can’t and don’t have to change anything. The only thing you should do is to make sure your projects don’t suffer because of these abscences. Let’s see how exactly they affect your projects and how human resource management systems can help you manage them effectively and avoid losses.
What is HRM System?
A human resource management system is a software solution that collects all available information about the people working for a company. It tracks employees’ performance, attendance, payroll management, sick leaves and days off, vacations, and so on.
Read more: Why calling people resources in a business environment is quite normal.
Personal data about a worker on the platform is available not only for an HR manager but also for a team lead so that they can get all the necessary information about an employee in an easy way.
In fact, human resource management involves not only tracking all the above-mentioned changes, but it’s also about human interaction within an organization. Read about four pillars and 7 benefits of managing people who are working for your company to improve your team spirit and increase productivity.
Human Resource Management in Multi-Project Environment
When working as a project manager in a multi-project environment, you have to handle dozens or hundreds of projects simultaneously. The difficulty in this context is not the number of projects themselves but more likely the number of people working on them: there can be more than hundreds or thousands of project team members.
As projects are always prone to different kinds of uncertainties, every PM would like to predict at least some of them to be ready to take respective measures without bearing any losses. Unplanned sick leaves, days off, and vacations often make up a real challenge for a project manager. Sometimes substituting resources and planning a schedule gets so difficult that a PM can’t balance load and capacity properly. This is where HRM systems are so needed.
Harmful Effect of Absenteeism on Your Projects
Probably everyone understands that it’s impossible to predict the absence of an employee at the workplace, well, at least sick days or unplanned days off. People may have their own difficulties, troubles, family issues, and may need some time to resolve them. In this context, we don’t focus on reasons of employees’ absence, the cornerstone is the absence itself.
According to CBS, in 2019, the absence rate because of illnesses was 4.4 percent in the Netherlands. And as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states, absenteeism losses comprised from $16 to $81 (small employer) and $17 to $286 (large employer) per employee annually. These figures give ground to dwell upon the way to reduce these losses, but not by forbidding personal days off, but using effective people management principles in your company.
Why Is Tracking Resource Availability so Significant for Successful Project Management?
Any resource availability changes have a strong impact on the following aspects:
- Project duration
- Task priorities and dependencies
- General load on other project team members
The main thing is that when an employee is absent for some reason, their work is performed by their opposite numbers, or, in many cases, just postponed. It’s obvious that these changes may negatively affect the on-time delivery of the project. This is why flexible planning with respect to sudden resource availability transformations is of utmost importance for efficient project management.
Benefits of Integration Between Your Pm Tool and HRM System
If a project management tool is integrated with a human resource management system, all availability changes automatically appear in the PM solution. As soon as an employee takes a day off / sick leave, a team lead and HR manager approve it, the capacity for this day gets automatically changed in the PM system. Therefore, a project manager can react immediately to avoid any project flow difficulties. Just think of the benefits such integration provides the system with where thousands of employees work on multiple projects simultaneously!
Epicflow Multi-Project Management Tool and Hurma HRM System Integration for Better Project Outcomes
We at Epicflow have developed an integration with Hurma HRM system for HYS Enterprise software development company. The firm works in a multi-project environment with more than 150 project team members involved. In turn, Hurma is a convenient tool for tracking employees’ progress, conducting progress reviews, managing payrolls and vacations. It gives a clear idea of resource availability in a company. Integration with Epicflow provides automatic updates regarding all availability changes.
Ekaterina Martyn is a project manager at HYS Enterprise and here’s what she thinks of the change adoption:
“Tracking resource availability is rather time-consuming. As a project manager, every time I had to talk to team leads about the approved days off and sick leaves and then fill the data manually. And given that availability changes can be sudden and happen every day, it took much time and effort to balance the load and capacity for the proper workflow”.
And speaking of a multi-project environment with thousands of employees involved, just imagine how much time these routine procedures take. And the most important thing is that these activities neither make you more efficient nor bring profit to your company. You just waste the time you could spend more gainfully for the projects you orchestrate.
“The integration has changed everything. Now I get an absolutely relevant and accurate image of the state of all projects when I need it. And even when I’m busy with other tasks I can respond to any transformations immediately. The more frequent data updates in the system we have, the more planning and resource management opportunities we get.” – Ekaterina Martyn goes on.
With Epicflow and Hurma integration, all resource availability-related information is updated automatically as soon as an employee’s request is approved. It provides an absolutely clear view of the project state and even under conditions of overload you can take all necessary measures to optimize the workflow and protect project due dates.
Willing to set up an integration for your company? Contact us!
Advance your resource management by eliminating redundant activities.
Other than software system, we still need human resource to manage some tasks.