Resource Management Software for the Global Creative Technology Company

Even the most profitable and mature businesses often face the challenge of planning and allocating resources correctly to complete projects well and on time.

The core resource for our Client is employees. With a large team of 17,000+ people located in different countries, managing resources effectively turns into a challenge. Without timely allocation of the right employees to the right projects, the project expenses may escalate and the project delivery might delay, resulting in money loss.

Developing a robust Resource Management software could resolve some business challenges of the enterprise by automating the following processes:

• Gathering and tracking actual information about human resources to get full visibility of the workforce capacity.
• Allocating resources automatically to save managers' time.
• Requesting additional resources to cover skill gaps and complete projects on time.
• Prioritizing projects to improve workflow efficiency across the organization.

Smart and streamlined resource management saves managers' time and stakeholders' money by automating the most time-consuming, repetitive processes in allocating and prioritizing resources and projects.

How does it work?

1. Gathering and tracking actual information about resources in a single interface for getting full visibility of the workforce capacity.

• The application keeps the current employees' database updated by getting actual information from the HR software of the enterprise.
• All resources are systemized and divided into departments for easier management.
• Having all the data gathered in a single dashboard in a Manager Tab, the system gives full visibility of employees' availability, their contract end dates, workload, etc. The software calculates financial KPIs and showcases this info in a Manager Tab based on pre-set financial data

A tab with a list of employees with their labor status, seniority level, personal data, and contract data transferred from the HR software

2. Allocating resources automatically for saving department and project managers' time.

• When planning a new project, a project manager determines resource requirements and enters the number of required resource units by roles, seniority level, and time.
• An algorithm automatically assigns the requested roles among the available resources by matching the indicated criteria. The department manager, who is responsible for assigning the right resources to the right projects, gets a full picture of who is working on what and when throughout the project's lifecycle. If a manager disagrees with the automated distribution, there is an option to adjust resources manually. Thanks to getting full visibility throughout departments, a department manager gets an opportunity to timely detect which resources are being over or under-utilized, and to evenly distribute the workload to prevent burnout or downtime.

Example of resource allocation in the Resource Management application performed automatically

3. Prioritizing projects to improve workflow efficiency across the organization.

The enterprise often faces situations when the number of required resources significantly exceeds the number of available resources.

This is a Conflict situation when top managers who have a full picture of company priorities and goals get involved in prioritizing projects and optimizing resource allocation.

• The software detects conflict cases when several projects need the same resources for the same period of time, but the amount of resources is insufficient.
• Every Conflict appears in the Business Planner application for top managers. They can see all the concurrent projects and the amount of available and required resource units.
• A responsible top manager re-assigns available resources among the concurrent projects. The resolved Conflicts are marked with green.
• The updated information is automatically transferred to the main dashboard for further consideration (postponing certain projects, hiring new employees, etc).

A list of conflicts for reassigning resources and prioritizing concurrent projects in the Business Planner built by Belitsoft

4. Requesting additional resources for covering skill gaps and completing projects in time.

• If current projects require more resources, a department manager can manually create a request for a new position. The special request form was created and embedded into the Resource Management software for that purpose.
• The software contains a set of standard criteria in terms of acceptable salary, role, contract duration, etc. When a manager creates a request, the algorithm checks if the request criteria match pre-defined criteria. If that is the case, such a request gets automatically approved and goes to the HR system. The software transfers this request to a responsible person or people who either decline or accept it manually if the indicated criteria do not match the predefined ones.
• After obtaining a required resource unit by outsourcing or hiring a new specialist, the information about a new employee gets from HR system into the Resource Management software with all the collateral data. That's when a new employee becomes available for current projects.
• If a certain employee is needed for a project outside their contract date, the system allows assigning a task to this employee. When such a condition appears, the algorithm checks if the contract extension corresponds to the pre-defined criteria. If so, the department manager automatically gets a notification with a contract extension request and details. If not, the request goes to manual approval.

Example of a request for a new hire created by a department manager through the Resource Management dashboard

Technologies Used for Developing the Web Application

• Language: C#;
• Framework: .NET;
• Technology: ASP.NET;
• Libraries: RabbitMQ, Quartz, Entity Framework, Entity Framework Core, SignalR;
• Database: MS SQL;
• Development tools: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, SSMS, DataGrip, Data Migration Assistant for migrating the SQL database.

Setting up Effective Cooperation Using Belitsoft's Best Practices

3 years of successful cooperation prove that Belitsoft knows and applies best practices to maximize benefits to the Client.

Starting a new project, we stick to the following best practices:

1. Choosing the most cost-effective cooperation model;
2. Applying a flexible management methodology;
3. Setting up regular and transparent communication.

Let's see how we have applied it to the Technicolor project.

We agreed on a Time and Material cooperation model to make the software development process as optimized and cost-effective for the Client as possible. The major advantage of T&M model is that the Client retains much more control over the project. The Client can change elements of the project when needed. In case the Client doesn’t have a detailed vision of the result as a whole, T&M is also a great pick.

At the same time, we pledged to do our best in retaining the same specialists in the project to minimize onboarding procedures and industry-specific knowledge transfer. It's a part of our best practice in favor of higher development productivity, quicker results, and higher customer satisfaction.

Except for the high professionalism of the outsourced team, the key to long and beneficial cooperation is flexibility.

We stick to the most flexible Agile approach in projects like this one where a client is constantly coming with new ideas, and the project scope is changing. Turning software development into an iterative process guarantees frequent and regular results delivery.

The development process can be described as an iteration cycle with a series of repeated steps:

Step 1. A Product Owner from the Client's team passes a project vision, requirements, or tasks to our team.

Step 2. A Client's Product Owner and Business Analyst with a designer from our side arrange one or several meetings to refine all the details about the requirements.

Step 3. Our team elaborates the solution and passes it to our Project Manager for further approval with the Client.

Step 4. Once the approval is obtained, the developers start working on the agreed functionality to deliver the result on time.

Step 5. The result is delivered to the Client. Our team gets feedback and adapts the result if needed.

During the entire process, our team keeps up regular communication with the Client to supply updates, and get feedback.

In this case, meetings and daily communication are performed through Slack, ClickUp, and other online means suitable for both parties.

Refactoring and Upgrading the Legacy Software

Technicolor already had a Resource Management Software when they came to us. However, that application did not fully cope with the challenges and required deep customization.

The initial client's request was to augment the functionality of the ERP. But how to perform it with minimal effort and costs if the software is out-of-date?

We are well aware from our past experience and expertise that sticking to outdated technology (JQuery in this case) often impedes adding new advanced features, and turns development into a time-consuming process.

It was decided to switch from ineffective JQuery code to VueJS for that reason.

The use of more efficient and up-to-date technology allowed our team to fulfill one of the major requirements of Technicolor Business Units in quite a short term - to automate the resource assignment workflow.

In addition, we suggested refactoring the software to the Client to find and fix bugs and to significantly increase the functionality of the app and the speed of development.

Our .NET development team divided the task into a series of steps, each of them was meant to solve a certain challenge experienced by the Client. See how the .NET development helped resolve business issues in the case study IT Infrastructure Modernization and Custom Development Based on .NET.

Starting Custom Development

With the legacy software upgraded, the Client realized that the augmented capacity of the new application and technology permitted them to remove initial limits and raise their resource management to a new level.

That's when our team passed from deep customization to custom software development from scratch.

The Client was experiencing a problem with project prioritization in case of resource scarcity. The department managers used to decide which projects to put first and which ones to delay without seeing a full picture across the company and without aligning their decisions with top managers. This could lead to serious strategic errors. The Client wanted to avoid the issue by assigning this task to the company's top managers.

To resolve this challenge, Belitsoft developed a new application, Business Planner, and smoothly integrated it into the Resource Management software.

The Business Planner is created especially for top managers of the enterprise to prioritize projects and manage resource allocation in disputed situations, such as a lack of resources.

Auto-assign is another custom feature that has become the core of the app.

Manual resource assignment was a huge pain point for the enterprise. After automating this workflow, the software is able to assign resources to projects based on predefined criteria, saving hours of work for department managers.

A convenient system of notifications and permissions has been created from scratch as well.

A flexible user roles distribution is an example. The possibility to assign roles with specific permissions to certain managers and admins has made the entire Resource Management software easier to manage.

Migrating to Cloud: How We Have Performed Migration to Azure

At the beginning of our cooperation, the enterprise had a physical server in a single location for storing and managing company data.

As Technicolor grew from a European company to a global enterprise, the company's requirements outgrew the legacy IT infrastructure consisting of a physical server located in the UK.

After facing a slowdown in the business operations performance, the enterprise decided to migrate to the Cloud. See the details of Azure Cloud Migration for a Global Creative Technology Company fully managed and completed by the Belitsoft team.

Team Scale and Roles

Maximum efficiency is our priority when building a team for a client's project. We waste no time adapting the scale and contents of a team to the client's requirements to achieve that.

For example, when our major task was refactoring and customization, the team included 3 specialists from our side: 2 frontend and 1 backend developers.

When we started to combine customization and custom development, the team was augmented up to 7 people: 2 frontend developers, 4 backend developers, 1 project manager, and a half-time QA specialist.

As of 2021, the team has increased to 19 specialists:

• 9 x Backend developers,
• 4 x Frontend developers,
• 3 x QA engineers,
• 1 x Project manager,
• 1 x Designer,
• 1 x Business analyst.

As we are open to being flexible and quickly reacting to the Client's demands, the team scope and roles may change next year depending on the new tasks our Client will delegate to Belitsoft.

All in all, 3 years of cooperation with Technicolor based on this approach prove that the Client is satisfied with such flexibility, which reveals in the testimonial from Technicolor top management.

During the years of mutual work between Technicolor and Belitsoft, software testing has always accompanied the development process to ensure high functionality, security, and UI of the delivered solutions. Read more about how we performed Software Testing in Resource Management application for Technicolor.

Now the Client successfully uses the upgraded Resource Management application together with a new Business Planner app to assign the right resources for the right projects at the right time throughout all their locations and departments.

By automating resource management workflows, the enterprise minimized resource waste and optimized working processes and the number of managers, which resulted in budget savings.

Another key benefit derived from smart resource management is smart contracts management. Contract extensions can be awarded faster and are backed by data.

Belitsoft and Technicolor continue their fruitful cooperation in augmenting possibilities of the Resource Management app, further automation of workflows in the enterprise, and optimization for Azure.

Our company worked without downtime throughout the entire pandemic and proved to be a reliable partner that always meets deadlines and delivers high-quality results.