“According to one report, global IT spending is expected to reach $4.5 trillion in 2022.” The IT industry faces many kinds of resource challenges.
The above statistics show the size and number of information technology (IT) companies. The IT industry is one of the fastest-growing industries, employing millions of people worldwide. However, the rapid growth has brought many challenges to the IT industry, such as cybersecurity threats, asset locking, export risks, economic downturns, and more.
Over the past few years, resource challenges such as skill shortages, employee burnout, and high workloads have become one of the biggest barriers to IT companies being profitable and sustainable. Meeting these challenges effectively and staying ahead is a must for IT companies.
This blog discusses the most effective approaches to these resource challenges in the IT industry.
Let’s get started.
What Are The Various Challenges Facing The IT Industry?
Among the many economic challenges facing the IT industry, the skills gap is one of the most important barriers to business sustainability. In the IT industry, technology advances at an alarming rate, and existing employee skill sets can quickly become obsolete. As a result, a widening skill gap can lead to last-minute delays, low delivery, and lost business opportunities.
Also, due to the high workload of IT, employee burnout is another challenge that organizations regularly encounter. Long hours and stressful work environments can negatively affect the physical and mental health of IT workers. As a result, employees begin to feel tired, which eventually affects their productivity and leads to unplanned terminations.
Another important challenge in business IT, especially in service-based organizations, is the difficulty of managing sudden increases and decreases in activity within a service. This leads to last-minute fire breaks or unaffordable resources sitting around due to a lack of suitable opportunities to match their skills. It can also lead to higher costs, project delays, reduced productivity, and reduced profits.
Now that we understand the various challenges in the IT industry, the next section will focus on solutions that can solve them.
How To Solve Resource Challenges In The IT Industry?
Here are some ways to reduce IT industry challenges:
1. Quickly predict and close the required capacity and space
The advent of advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and new programming languages has resulted in obsolete skills, leading to increased skill development and resource shortages in the IT sector. If this skill gap is not closed in time, it can become a barrier to business sustainability.
Organizations can close skill gaps by anticipating the infrastructure needs of pipeline projects ahead of time. Managers can analyze gaps and manage skills-building and training programs to equip employees with the skills and abilities necessary to perform high-level tasks.
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2. Enable employees to work to increase productivity
If IT teams don’t have high-level visibility into their resource pool, they can’t ensure the best resources are used. The lack of visibility prevents the research managers from using the production of any equipment, resulting in billing losses. Additionally, employees spend more time on unpaid or menial tasks, which can lead to reduced engagement.
When provided with the availability of resources and the realization of the limits of the company, the resource managers can identify the resources that work without costs such as meeting rooms, BAU, administration, support, and others. Managers can combine these resources from non-billing programs to billing or strategic planning to maximize production utilization, thereby increasing overall ROI.
3. Manage sudden increases and decreases in activity within the project
In the IT industry, resource requirements change dramatically, resulting in sudden increases and decrease in IT workloads and services. Last-minute shutdown results occur when managers cannot anticipate a sudden increase in activity. On the other hand, when rotating equipment is not managed properly, they end up sitting on the bench for a long time. This reduces their billing capacity and increases costs for the IT organization.
When resource managers understand the future plans for project resources, they can manage sudden increases and decreases in activity within a project. For example, resource managers can allocate spare resources to other job opportunities, conduct training, estimate future workloads, or sell excess capacity at a discount.
4. Implement best practices to combat employee burnout
IT workers may experience burnout due to workload, lack of control over their work, or improper treatment. It can lead to low engagement, low performance, and unplanned turnover, affecting overall productivity and service delivery. Therefore, managers can apply optimization techniques such as resource allocation and resource optimization to combat the oversaturation of workers and overcome imbalances in resource allocation.
For example, in flexible projects where scheduling is possible, managers can adjust project start times based on resource availability. This ensures that all the work equipment is used to the best of its ability. Similarly, if managers find that existing resources are being overutilized, they can shift work to specific projects.
