Resource scheduling in project management
A well-organized resource schedule helps keep your team in a state of flow. When resources are allocated properly, projects finish on time and productivity soars.
Within project management, the scheduling of resources can be a challenge, particularly for project managers. For those with large teams and multiple work streams, it’s easy to mismanage company resources. You must match resources and projects without causing conflicts, and it only takes one surprise to throw your plans off balance.
This article will define resource scheduling and its importance in project management, as well as discuss the common challenges associated with it.
What is resource scheduling?
Resource scheduling allocates assets to specific tasks and projects within a set timeframe. Depending on the industry, your resources could include team members, equipment, and facilities.
Everyone from team members to stakeholders has access to the resource schedule, which outlines time commitments and responsibilities throughout the project life cycle, ensuring there is no confusion.
For most projects, resource scheduling involves answering three questions:
- What resources does this project need?
- When does it need those resources?
- Are those resources available?
Answering these questions keeps everyone on track and prevents delays, as it allows project managers to identify exact resource requirements, time restraints, and availability. Effective resource scheduling is also a crucial component of effective time management, ensuring that your team utilizes available hours productively and meets project objectives.
The importance of resource scheduling in project management
Staying on top of shifting priorities becomes much more complicated without a resource schedule. Resource planning keeps people working when resources are few and deadlines are tight.
Here’s why resource scheduling matters:
Enhances project efficiency
There are several ways to sabotage project efficiency, from assigning the wrong resources to delegating tasks too late. Resource scheduling allows managers to see the entire project scope and what each project needs.
Imagine you need a senior developer to work on the company app but don’t practice resource scheduling. You may forget that the developer needs to collaborate with the finance team until it’s too late, forcing you to change the project timeline.
With resource scheduling, you assign all resources and tasks during the project planning phase. That way, you don’t have to worry about fixing resource conflicts.
Prevents resource overallocation
Suppose you have a senior developer working on a new app. Are they also working on the new website? What about the chatbot management that wants to launch at the same time? If the decision-making process only looks at when the developer is available, you might overload them.
Resource management lets you distribute work evenly to avoid burnout. You'll know if someone stretches themselves too thin or needs more work.
Preventing overallocation makes financial sense. If you have a faulty or nonexistent resource schedule, assigning too many resources to a project is expected. Extra resources add to the final bill and limit the team's ability to do other things.
Resource scheduling software stops overallocation. However, there may be a learning period. Assess your team’s average productivity to ensure equitable task allocation.
Improves project timelines and delivery
A typical project might involve multiple deadlines for introducing a new feature to your website, planning for design checks, user testing, and a budget review. Managing these deadlines can get confusing if you don’t use resource management tools. Overallocation, unnoticed task dependencies, and other factors could cause your team to miss deadlines.
Resource scheduling puts all your assets and projects in front of the team so you can create a logical project timeline that enhances project delivery. When projects are completed on time and meet major parameters, everybody wins.
Ensures optimal resource utilization
Do you have team members sitting idle because their projects don’t fill the workday? Are team members working beyond their capacity? Resource scheduling shows how your team uses its resources and the results of that utilization.
You achieve optimal resource utilization when you extract the most productivity from your resources with minimal waste. Manually finding that balance is almost impossible, and without resource scheduling, you lose track of resources and their availability. This makes identifying under- or overutilized resources difficult and may cause you to struggle to assign roles effectively.
Resource scheduling showcases each team member's tasks in real-time, allowing you to quickly adjust when problems arise. For example, you can reassign a task to someone with more time and skills or rebalance your team’s capacity.
Types of resource scheduling
Different projects require different approaches to resource scheduling. Understanding when to use each method can help you pick the right strategy for your team’s needs.
The most common types of resource scheduling methods include:
- Time-based scheduling: This method focuses on specific time slots and deadlines for project execution. It involves assigning resources based on when tasks need to be completed rather than resource availability. Time-based scheduling is well-suited for projects with fixed deadlines, like product launches or marketing campaigns.
- Resource leveling: When you have limited resources but flexible deadlines, resource leveling helps smooth out workload peaks. This method adjusts project timelines to match your team’s capacity, meaning you might extend a project by a few weeks instead of overwhelming your best designer with three simultaneous campaigns.
- Resource smoothing: Unlike leveling, resource smoothing maintains your original project timeline while redistributing work within that timeframe. This approach works when deadlines are non-negotiable, but you need to balance team workloads, which may involve adjusting the timing of some tasks within the same project phase.
The complexity of your project typically determines which method is the best fit. Simple projects with clear timelines often need just time-based scheduling. Meanwhile, complex projects with multiple dependencies benefit from resource leveling or smoothing to prevent bottlenecks.
How to create an effective resource schedule for your next project
Creating a resource schedule that truly works involves more than just listing tasks. It requires a strategic approach to availability, skills, and project goals.
Here's how you can leverage Jira to tackle this challenge:
Step 1: Create a project
Begin by setting up your project in Jira, which lays the foundation for accurate scheduling and task management. This step establishes the framework that guides every scheduling decision. Choose a project template that aligns with your workflow, whether it's Scrum, Kanban, or a custom approach. This choice impacts how you visualize and manage your resource schedule throughout the project life cycle.
Step 2: Create Tasks for Your Project
Properly creating issues in Jira sets you up for accurate resource allocation. Use different issue types for various work: tasks for specific actions, epics for larger projects, stories for requirements, and bugs for problems needing fixes. Align task requirements with team members’ skills and experience. A senior developer might finish a complex integration in two days, while a junior developer needs a week. Your resource schedule should reflect these skill differences.
Step 3: Assess Resource Availability and Scheduling
Review calendars, current workloads, and planned time off to identify constraints affecting resource access. Visualizing work in Jira provides different perspectives on resource allocation. Jira’s board view displays issues in workflow steps, while the timeline view helps plan work, track progress, and map dependencies. These visual tools help identify problems before they derail your schedule.
Step 4: Monitor and Adjust Regularly
Track progress and reassign resources as needed when delays or changes occur. Jira offers data-driven reports and insights to help you see how projects evolve and priorities shift. Maintain open communication with the team through regular check-ins to identify problems early and make adjustments before they escalate. Jira's reports, combined with the timeline view, enable teams to effectively monitor how well their resource schedule aligns with actual project progress.
By following these steps and utilizing Jira's robust features, you can create an effective resource schedule that enhances project efficiency and ensures optimal resource utilization.
Common challenges in resource scheduling
In a perfect world, resource scheduling would be hiccup-free. Schedules would fall into place with little friction, and resources would always be available.
Teams frequently struggle with project constraints, varying scopes, and competing interests. For example, the content team wants to use your new freelancer to create website blogs, while the advertising crew believes new ad copy should come first. However, prioritization is a vital part of resource scheduling
Here are four common challenges teams encounter with resource scheduling:
Resource conflicts and overallocation
Overallocation is often a team’s biggest problem. Simple resource scheduling usually prevents extreme cases of overallocation. However, this problem is more persistent than it seems.
Say you assign someone three concurrent tasks, each taking one-third of their workday. That doesn’t leave much wiggle room. If one project falls behind, the others will likely follow, leaving the worker stressed and scrambling to meet deadlines. Now, the team has a resource conflict.
You may not be able to eradicate overallocation problems with resource scheduling, but you can limit their occurrence by ensuring you have a resource management plan in place and watching for updates.
Handling resource availability and skills
Resource scheduling makes it easy to assign tasks, but what if someone isn’t available?
Resource leveling refers to shifting task due dates to accommodate limited resources. For example, if one designer needs to work on two ad campaigns, you can lengthen the project timeline instead of hiring another designer.
If you rely on spreadsheets and whiteboards, you may struggle to find the necessary information. An overview of who’s working on a particular project also won’t help when looking for specific skills or availability.
With an effective resource management software such as Jira, you can track each team member's schedule and abilities. This software allows you to spot potential bottlenecks before they grow and employ tactics such as resource leveling.
Managing changes and uncertainties
Resource scheduling helps your project management team respond to changes, but it may not be enough if the schedule has limited space.
You may acquire a new client or see a team member exit for maternity leave. How do you fit this in if the schedule is full and you don’t have extra resources available? When things like this happen, you typically have three choices: pause a project, delay deadlines, or hire more help.
Using software makes changes more manageable. With Jira, you receive automatic change notifications, allowing you more time to determine the next steps.
Balancing multiple projects and priorities
Everyone on your team has projects and priorities. Even if team member goals align, you still have to balance multiple projects, and resource scheduling doesn’t give you a key to determining priority.
While properly scheduling resources helps smooth out difficulties, it’s not the only solution. You may overlook individual motivations, making regular communication with your team critical. Asking for project updates and keeping your door open to feedback is critical.
This challenge becomes more complex when you're juggling different types of work. Your Gantt chart might show everything fits perfectly on paper, but the reality of context switching between projects can slow everyone down. Some team members thrive on variety, while others perform better with focused, single-project work.
Best practices for resource scheduling
Effective resource scheduling is about more than just matching people to tasks. You need strategies that prevent the common pitfalls that derail projects and burn out teams.
Follow these best practices for resource scheduling:
- Include buffer time in your schedules: Don't pack every minute of every day. Tasks often take longer than expected, emergencies pop up, and people need breathing room. Build in extra time for most tasks. This buffer prevents one delayed task from derailing your entire project timeline.
- Schedule regular check-ins with your team: Weekly or bi-weekly meetings help you find problems early. These don't need to be long meetings — just long enough to surface any roadblocks or changes in availability. Team members often hesitate to speak up about problems until they become crises, so create safe spaces for these conversations.
- Use historical data to improve your planning: Track tasks to know how long tasks and larger projects actually take, compared to your estimates. After completing a few projects, you'll start to see patterns. Maybe your design reviews always take twice as long as planned, or your developers consistently finish coding tasks early but need extra time for testing. Use this data to make better estimates next time.
Jira centralizes all your project information in one place, giving you unified visibility into resource allocation through features like timeline views, capacity planning, and custom fields. At the same time, you can use Jira Product Discovery to prioritize which projects deserve resources before they become commitments, ensuring you schedule resources for high-impact work rather than just urgent tasks.
Optimize Your Resource Scheduling with Jira

Say goodbye to the chaos of juggling spreadsheets, email threads, and disparate calendar apps. Jira offers a cohesive platform that provides a comprehensive view of tasks and responsibilities. With features like custom fields, you can track specific data points crucial for making informed resource decisions. Jira’s timeline view offers a complete picture of your project schedule, showcasing task dependencies and resource assignments seamlessly.
Jira's dashboards allow you to create personalized views that spotlight resource utilization across various projects. With Jira Plans, you can engage in capacity planning to prevent overallocation before it becomes an issue. Summary views offer quick insights into project status and resource allocation, facilitating effective communication with stakeholders.
Enhancing Jira's resource scheduling capabilities, Jira Product Discovery empowers teams to prioritize ideas effectively. It helps determine which projects merit your resources, ensuring that not every idea automatically becomes a project. By evaluating impact, effort, and strategic alignment, Jira Product Discovery aids in smarter resource allocation decisions.
By integrating discovery work with delivery planning, you can avoid allocating resources to unnecessary projects and ensure that teams focus on completing the right tasks efficiently.
Ready to improve your resource scheduling? Use the free project schedule template.