April 18, 2025

Stop the Talent Madness: Unleash Resource Management Sanity!

SPM Mythbusters Series

3 min read

Key Takeaways

Establish effective resource management, which starts with accurately defining roles, not just individuals.
Focus on interchangeability to create flexible resource pools.
Prioritize consistent skills tracking to identify and address skill gaps.

Resource management is often a chaotic mess, with leaders struggling to understand who they have, what they can do, and how to allocate them effectively. This chaos is often fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of how to categorize and manage talent. It's time for a "talent management" myth buster.

The "individual" trap

The biggest mistake is managing resources as individuals, rather than as roles. It's like organizing your tool shed by serial number instead of by the function of the tool. As you get more and more "tools," you run into management problems. You can't see where bottlenecks are and what skills are lacking. You end up with a fragmented, inefficient mess.

Roles: The key to interchangeability

Think of roles as buckets, and skills as the water droplets inside those buckets. The key is not to get lost on each skill, but to be able to organize around what's important.

A role is defined by interchangeability. Are you willing to switch one person for another to perform a task? If so, they fill the same role. If not, they should be considered separate roles.

Example of a role: Product manager. Jane, John, or Alfred can do it.

Example of not a role: The "do-everything" person.

Once you have roles to build around, managing the water droplets—skills, resources, and so on—becomes much easier.

Skills: Matching, not measuring

Skills are important, but they shouldn't be used to create an overly granular, unmanageable role structure. Skills are best used for matching people to specific tasks or projects, not for measuring aggregate demand. Tracking skills is helpful to see if, in general, there are sufficient resources for certain things.

Skills are for matching and finding, not measuring demand.

Visibility: The foundation of effective resource management

The first step towards better resource management is visibility. Do you know who you have? Do you know what roles they perform? Do you know what skills they possess? For many organizations, the answer is no. And if the answer is yes, the inventory isn’t kept up to date.

By implementing a system that encourages consistent skills tracking, you can gain valuable insights into your organization's talent pool. How many people know how to work on AI initiatives? If the answer is not enough, what are you going to do about it?

Reclaim control of your resources

Effective resource management isn't about tracking individuals. It's about creating a system that allows you to:

Define roles: Focus on interchangeability, not specific skills.
Track skills: Identify and address skill gaps across the organization.
Prioritize visibility: Ensure your skills inventory is accurate and up to date.

By mastering these fundamentals, you can unlock the full potential of your workforce and drive greater success.

Tag(s): ValueOps , Clarity , Resource Management , Skills Management

Jason Kotlinski

Jason Kotlinski serves as Product Manager for Clarity with clients all across the globe. He is responsible for customer-facing aspects of product management, leading development of key marketable features, and assisting senior management with backlog prioritization and new feature definition.

Other Resources You might be interested In

Blog September 9, 2025

Observability and Monitoring Governance (Part 1 of 4)

Find out how strong monitoring governance can help IT teams cut through the noise, see what truly matters, and act with precision.

Read Blog

Blog September 9, 2025

Observability and Monitoring Governance (Part 2 of 4)

Read this post and discover some of the top downstream benefits of establishing strong monitoring governance. Gain best practices on how and where to start.

Read Blog

Blog September 9, 2025

DX UIM Hub Interconnectivity and the Benefits of Static Hubs

Find out how using static hubs is a powerful way to enhance observability. Discover when and how to use static hubs, and the benefits they can provide.

Read Blog

Blog September 8, 2025

Broadcom Recognized as a Leader: Engineering the Future of Service Orchestration

Read this post and see why Broadcom was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms.

Read Blog

Video September 8, 2025

Customer Spotlight: Global Bank MUFG Saves Millions of Dollars

MUFG’s Bruce Frank discusses how the global bank invokes Broadcom's Automated Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) to manage SLAs and ensure regulatory compliance, saving millions of dollars annually.

View Webinar

Blog September 8, 2025

The "Lighthouse" of Strategy: Guiding Your Organization Through Decision Chaos

Strategic clarity is key. See how strategic portfolio management (SPM) helps align resources and decisions for better business outcomes and ROI.

Read Blog

Blog September 8, 2025

4 Ways AppNeta Enhances Cost-Focused Cloud Planning

See how AppNeta delivers insights that enable cloud architects to correlate wasted spending with performance degradation and proactively relocate resources.

Read Blog

Video September 5, 2025

Automic Automation Cloud Integrations: Azure Functions Agent Integration

Broadcom's Azure Functions Automation Agent lets you easily execute Azure Functions, monitor and manage them with your existing enterprise workload automation, as well as other cloud-native...

Watch Video

Blog September 4, 2025

The Public Internet Is Not Your WAN

Moving beyond MPLS was a strategic necessity. To succeed in modern environments, you need to stop guessing about internet performance and start measuring it.

Read Blog