Episode 24 Transcript

Brent Trimble: Welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. Again, I'm Brent Trimble, and my guest today is the president and CEO at RTM Consulting and the managing director of the Resource Management Institute known as RMI, Randy Mysliviec. Randy, great to have you back on the show.

Randy Mysliviec: Hey Brent, thanks for inviting me, and I'm delighted to spend some time talking with you about an important topic today.

Brent Trimble: No it's great, thanks again. And you reference that you have been on in the past and back in March of this year, we talked to you on the show about data you'd been gathering from the 2021 RMI research report, specifically focused on resource utilization and some of the key findings there. Today, we'll pivot a bit and we're gonna look at the latest RMI survey series results around resource management automation solutions, and would love to have you walk us through the top trends you're seeing emerge. Then it would be great to dig into a few of those topics, maybe the notion of automated staffing and augmenting resource pools. And of course, with our clients and our potential partners, these are top of mind for everyone. But before we kick things off, for users and listeners who are not as familiar with RMI, the Resource Management Institute, could you tell us a little bit about the organization and the subsequent research that you do?

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, absolutely Brent, thanks for asking. So the Resource Management Institute was formed in 2016. It was roughly a spin-off from RTM Consulting, the parent company, where we help service organizations get better at what they do. And as a part of that work we had done for more than 15 years, resource management was always about half of our business. And so we've become quite knowledgeable in helping project-based organizations, particularly in professional services, how to get better at the management of their most expensive investment that they make in their companies and that's in people. And so the resource management Institute came to be in 2016. Today, it has more than 2000 members and we essentially are all things to resource management and we help with research into space. We publish reports in the space about that. We run various events that are specific to resource management and we publish white papers and other things. Probably most importantly, we have a certification program to teach people who want to learn how to do better resource management. It's called resource management certified professional program. We teach them everything that we think they need to know about resource management to make it effective in their enterprises.

Brent Trimble: Yeah, I was gonna ask you, I've had some colleagues who've gone through the certification process and talked about the value there. Just this notion of codifying and understanding what that role really entails, and how it's evolved over time.

Randy Mysliviec: We started the RMCP training back in 2014. We actually started doing it before we formed the institute itself, and it took off, did very well. And then we had a lot of requests from people to build an institute around it and that eventually led us to run annual conferences and things, but the training's been around now for gosh, eight years, I wanna say, since our very first certification course. And since then, we've had more than 500 different companies put their resource managers through this program and it's continuing to grow quite rapidly, and we're excited to continue to be able to deliver it and hopefully the value it provides to the people that go through the program.

Brent Trimble: Oh, that's great. So for users who are interested in that, you can go on the resourcemanagementinstitute.com website, and read a bit about that. So we talked a little bit about the research that came out in 2021, and today we'll look at some of the latest survey series results around resource management automation. Describe potentially just the methodology and the types of firms you surveyed and then the topics, and then we'll dig into some of the trends that have emerged.

Randy Mysliviec: Okay, perfect. So the one we're gonna be talking about on resource management automation, I believe, was the 22nd survey we've done since we started doing this. We generally do four research surveys a year. They're done quarterly and we publish a report out of that. Generally speaking, we'll have 1 to 200 different respondents, it’s usually 50 to 75 companies and they represent professional services. It’s our biggest respondent base, but we also get input from enterprise IT organizations, marketing agencies accounting, audit tax firms and product development organizations. And pretty soon we're gonna start doing the same thing for law firms as well. All organizations that have billable people just as in professional services, a different business, but nonetheless, it's still human capital needed to deliver their services, and so that's what that's all about. And the automation survey is something we do every year, so we're building a trends database for resource management automation tools. And we look at pretty much all things that those tools do for users that want to automate their resource management environments.

Brent Trimble: And when you reference the notion of automation for context, and as you frame that question to the respondents, and to the targets in the survey, what's the context there? How is that articulated to them?

Randy Mysliviec: Well we articulated around the necessity to have a good process to run resource management. And then from our prior broadcast, as an example, when we teach resource management certified professionals how to do better resource management, we teach them this what we called just-in-time resource. And it's made up of six elements that we teach our students as to these are the six elements that you've gotta have in place process-wise in order to effectively manage resources. And then we go on to say that those six pieces of the process need to be managed by some kind of an automation tool. If I'm doing forecasting, where do you store your data, and how do you report from that? If you have a skills database, where you store information about your resources, and then how do you extract value from that? You have projects that you want to input in staff too, how do you then do that and how do you have the system help you with staffing?

So the context is you need a good process to manage resource management, but then you need an automation tool to automate those processes. So you get the advantage of automation to serve up information for people to make better decisions on. And so when we sent out that survey, it's all around how do people use those tools? We asked them how they do those six things in just-in-time resourcing and handle those processes. We ask them how big a population they're serving with those tools, and how long have they used them. Are they happy with them? Are they effective? Are they thinking of changing them? And then we go through those six things and talk about how your tool handles forecasting and how it does for the skills database. How does it do for governance and reporting and those sorts of things? And they're getting more comprehensive as we go. We've been adding questions, making them larger as time goes on, as we want to get deeper data about what's going on, as well as to develop a better fix on the trends, you know, are getting better for people or they use them differently. And it's been fascinating. I think this one we did on automation was the fourth time we've done this automation tools report, and we've got some really clear views of how things are going, how things are trending, and exciting data. And we think it's a great benchmark for people to go and get this report. You can get the report from the RMI website for free.

Brent Trimble: No it's great, and I was gonna make a note of that, that sounds like a great resource. And we find in talking with our potential partners and folks that are in the professional services space, whether it's to your point, consulting firm, tax advisory, marketing services firm, that indexing against peers and understanding how the business, operations, and platforms are evolving are always valuable. So it's great, the user can just go on the website and access this information.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, and we encourage people, there are 22 reports sitting out there you can get for free. And if you're responsible for resource management in your business, it's a great place to get good benchmark information. So you can benchmark how you're doing on any of the elements of the just-in-time resourcing process. We talk about how you're doing relative to the use of technology in your space. Some of the research is on the role of the resource manager, the resource management office, you know, how companies are positioning RMOs, and how they're investing in them. Again, for anything related to resource management, we've got a large and growing database of information that’s again, free to people in this space. We hope they'll continue to take advantage of it.

Brent Trimble: No, that's great. And so let's discuss and learn from you a bit on some of these emerging trends. You've been doing these a while and as the practice, probably certainly the platforms, the technology has continued to evolve and modernize over time. The trends shift a bit. So we're interested, maybe give us the three trends you saw emerge from this data that seemed common and repeatable, and then we can discuss those.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, perfect. Well, one is certainly that we've been at this with the parent company RTMC for 15 years, with the institute now for six and with our certification program for eight years. And clearly, through that time, you reel back 15 years, the industry was still pretty nascent relative to how it was adopting good quality resource management practices. And I would compare and contrast project management training and processes and things have been around much longer, 40, 50 years. And so resource management really just kind of came into its being 10, 15 years ago and it's accelerated. And one thing we've seen that was one of the first things we called out in that report is we're finally starting to see a wave of companies who got in early, said okay, this resource management thing's important. We want to get better at it, we wanna buy a tool, and build a process. A lot of them have matured to the stage now where they have the fundamentals down. They're getting good utilization, and they're getting good value from it. You know, better predictability on their project startups, you know, how they manage their projects. Because they've figured out this right person, right place, right time has a lot of positive impacts on their project performance, particularly in professional services.

So the first thing we called out is that those organizations, that first wave of those companies have started to look at more advanced capabilities like automated staffing. The tools up until last year or four years ago, gave you the information you needed to make good staffing choices, but generally fell somewhat short about spitting out, okay for this project, of the 22 people you need, here's 20, you're gonna have to go figure out who the next two are. People want tools now where instead of having to pick the whole project team, let the system pick the easier ones so that the resource managers can spend time on more complex project staffing, just a bigger volume of staffing. Or in particular, where I've gotta go find resources that may be outside the enterprise. And so they're looking for tools that really feed more automated staffing capabilities as an example. So that was number one that came out.

Number two was what we've called out now four years in a row, huge dependency on spreadsheets. And so four years ago, arguably you could have said there's still a need for spreadsheets in these environments. Today we have a pretty good view into a lot of the tools that are available in this space. And quite frankly, if you've picked the right tool, you’ve got the right processes built, and your dependencies on spreadsheets should have been dramatically reduced from where they may have been four or five years ago. 71% of our respondents said they're still using spreadsheets to manage resources. And so we find that concerning, why is it that those capabilities do exist today in these tools, but yet we're still relying on the spreadsheets from the past? And then the third thing, we would like to believe we've been a good catalyst for companies that are building professional services automation tools to hear from us what users like about their tools and what they don't like. And what they'd like to see, where the investments are going and those sorts of things.

Over the years when we've been focusing on weaknesses and those tools, particularly in forecasting and skills database and skills automation tracking, those sorts of things, the vendors have made a ton of progress in that area. They're not perfect, there's still room for improvement, but they've gotten a lot better. So we still call out a need for those things to get better because our respondents are still telling us there are weaknesses there. But again, they're also asking for more advanced capabilities like automated staffing and more support for their BI and artificial intelligence requirements. So AI is an example for automated staffing, and what a great application of having your AI tool look at the project, look at the project needs, go to your skills database, and figure out who has those skills that are available during the right project. You know, the window that you need and bam and spit out maybe 80% of your project team so that your resource managers can spend the time on filling the gaps that might remain. So that was the third one, was just this whole area of making some additional progress on those core fundamental things. But adding the future functionality through tools like AI, BI and again, automated staffing. So those are the three biggest things that we saw in this report from when we did it a year earlier.

Brent Trimble: That's really interesting. And we have the benefit of talking with probably thousands of potential partners annually, and then bringing on several hundred each year. And each organization's in a different stage of maturity and evolution, right? Some are coming from pure spreadsheet, organic knowledge, understanding of whom they've got in their organization and going by gut and feel, and some practical notions of who's not underwater in terms of being over-utilized. All the way through, I think to your point, firms that were early into PSA staffing automation, resource planning as a discipline, and they see the value and they want to take the platform further. And for our listeners, when you talk about this notion of having the platform do more and automate more of the process is what you describe, the notion of a project comes in, maybe it's through a CRM, sales team, whatever the case may be. It's either commercial has been executed with a client or potentially it's imminent. We know this is gonna start, and particularly for management consulting and marketing services clients, they'll almost have to start that fit casting team process prior to a kickoff. And then the roles, certainly the skills, the fit dimensions like time zone, certainly client specificity, vertical experience. And then ultimately, can we margin, or can the resources that we array and deploy for this platform help the firm make money? And if we're describing this correctly, what they're after is having more of that synthesizing of the data, assembling the team, and then potentially having options to explore on a staffing plan that works best, that process automated.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, I think actionable data is a phrase that comes to mind, to me, what we called actionable data five years ago, we probably call it something different. We would've probably called it, I don't know, fundamentals data or something like that. But as you were describing, if we want to use the automated staffing example, we've taken all this data that's sitting in our skills database, our forecasting environment, the project inputs that we're trying to staff and let the system go mine all that data and figure out for us, how to put together the right person, right place, right time to make that start to come to life. Whereas five years ago that was some resource manager looking at the data coming from each of those areas of their PSA tool and putting together the project plan. Putting the names in the boxes, and then coming forward and saying to the delivery team “Here's the team to do this project.”

Today, the tools will do a lot more of that heavy lifting, and it gives the managers and the resource managers a chance to spend more time. Their time and attention and knowledge will be of more value other than just moving data around and putting it in the right buckets. It's looking at the data now and what does it say? And by the way, now I can use my RMS for as I mentioned, bigger and more complex projects. Sometimes those things are not only just getting the right quantity of people and the right skill sets, but sometimes it's the personalities too. And being able to think through some of the other aspects of making a great, big, important complex project management task go better because we picked a team that was more on target with what the client needed. And having the automation tool do more of that for me, frees up time for the resource manager to spend more time on the things maybe those tools can't quite do yet.

Brent Trimble: Yeah, and what you describe is probably to an extent, a holy grail of eventuality of capability where the propensity for success could potentially manifest in the tool. We're scoring dimensions of success, we're scoring different staff plans based on parameters like profitability and fit, but ultimately, maybe over time with AI machine learning, training the systems to develop that success score potentially.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, and I think it can also help with the thing that we're lacking in the industry today too Brent, is the ability to go back and look at okay, we just ran 20 projects in the last two quarters. You know, we know what the profitability was, we know which ones are late, and which ones were not late. But the question then is can I go back and look at the data and what does it tell me that for the next 20, I should do differently to produce a better outcome? Did I pick my labor from the right place? Did I overkill the project, or did I under-skilled the project? Could I have offshore some of that work? I mean there are all kinds of dimensions, and that data is sitting in these PSA tools, it's just not being mined. And to be fair though, the processes and the teams that are running it are not yet sophisticated enough to where they've gotten to that point where they’re spending more time on what I would call strategic resource management. It's how do I take that data now, and figure out going forward, how to do that 3% better than I did the last quarter. How do I improve on that next year?

I think I might have mentioned in a prior broadcast, one of the things that we're trying to get people focused on is how you actually look at your labor costs per hour and try to drive that down year to year. In an environment where we know the labor pressures and costs of labor, the pressures are upwards. And it really comes down to can you get the data that says I could have made smarter choices, better choices, again, back to under-skilling, over-skilling or did I do the work in the right place. There are all kinds of different dimensions that I could look at to help me produce a future better outcome. And to me, that's a competitive advantage for a professional services team to be able to look forward and say wow, I could take data, and put it to work for me in a way that my competitor doesn’t. And I can put together a smarter team in a smarter way to produce a better outcome. I think it's quite exciting that technology is gonna allow us to do that. It's not there yet, but it's gonna get there and we see the pieces of that coming together, so really cool.

Brent Trimble: No, that's great. And then also, what does it mean for our talent, for colleagues who are working in this space, there are dimensions to being selected and cast on a team that is important to their career. Interest categories and client work, meaningful work, which are things we see on the other side of the equation when different surveys and pieces of data come out about the market. The future of talent and all the dimensions and how that's been thrown into upheaval in the past couple of years.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, employee engagement is a huge topic right now because retention rates are not where companies would like them to be. We know the generational changes, the great resignation, and labor shortages, I mean it's like the perfect storm has hit in the world of labor for professional consulting services organizations. And so the need for me to create a better bond with the people in my organization is absolutely there. And people talk about this in terms of employee engagement, and employee satisfaction, call it what you want. But one of the things that we at the RMI have been talking and writing about is that the time has come where we actually have the ability to start to do a better job of employee engagement at scale. And I don't mean yeah, Brent, you got five people go spend more time with your people. Because those folks are worn out, the managers have so many responsibilities, just telling them to go spend more time and do more engaging things with their employees is not necessarily the answer. We need to put technology to work because a lot of the time employee engagement and employee satisfaction, particularly in professional consulting services is I simply wanna let people do more of the kind of work they want to do. That they think is in line with their interest, they think is in line with their career growth, and in line with their career development.

So today's tools were designed largely to pick a team that fits the economic needs of the project. Not too many people, not too few, don't overkill and don't under skill. But up until the last couple of years, companies just didn't use their PSA tools much to figure out okay, before I actually assigned people to work, have I also considered this other dimension of employee engagement? And maybe finding a better balance where maybe what I just did for this delivery team, isn't the best economic decision for me, the vendor. But in the long run, I'm gonna make Harry, Sally, and Sam happier because they're gonna get a better shot to do the kind of work they want to do, when they want to do it. They think it's in line with their career growth, whatever their personal pursuits might happen to be. And now I've got a better balance of serving my employee base at scale with an automation tool for resource management. Better in balance with what are still important economic considerations, relative to margins and profits for the companies that are doing these projects.

So I think it's a huge opportunity for companies to step back and say okay, how do I get ahead of the curve in this employee engagement thing and do it at scale? And that's what computers do well, right? They take lots of information and they serve it up in a way that we can now make better management choices in this case about how I'm gonna staff my teams. So we're gonna see a lot more need for that. We certainly are seeing a demand for that, people asking us about best practices in this area, how are people going about that? We've written some white papers and you'll see various research snippets from us on this whole area of employee engagement and doing it at scale with your process and your tool.

Brent Trimble: And the discussion so far has been really rich in terms of what's possible. And we've seen this era now of the platforms being able to distill and synthesize and collate data, and deploy things like scenario plans. To your point, a lot of that's around economics, and there are so many more dimensions than just the economics of staffing the right team on a consulting project for instance. But in the research, there's this figure that stands out, that as far as satisfaction with the current suite of tools available, only 32% of respondents noted they were satisfied. And one of the call-outs was around this topic of automated support for staffing and conversely also low satisfaction and skills tracking and management, you know, keeping that rich metadata around talent and resources available. What are the key reasons you take away from those insights from the research, is it that this is driven by maybe early adopters who feel that the technology's not keeping pace, or is it folks and firms that are new to resource planning as a discipline? We'd love to hear your take on that.

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, I think what we were talking about a little bit earlier is that the marketplace is maturing. What was a meets minimum capability and a resource automation tool five years ago, it doesn't cut it any longer. And the resource management offices have become more sophisticated in the processes they put in place and the kind of people they have running those processes. And one of the things we can tell an organization is probably not using is automation tools or processes aren't quite built where the resource managers are doing lots of administrative tasks. All I'm doing is trying to play triage. I got a project, it has to get started by next Tuesday, and I got resource managers running around as quickly as they can trying to find people to staff a project. And those organizations are moving past that to where they want the tool to come forward where they said in automated staffing, and the reason that I think that number was so low is because the tools today don't generally do a great job of automated staffing. And I mentioned that they're better fixed at the moment to come up and say okay, this is a project you gotta do. You need 12 people with these skills, so here are the 22 people you can pick from, and then that's the resource manager's job from that point.

Where the industry needs to go now is for that tool to come forward and say no, you had a project with 12 people, here are nine people that we think are spot on, just put their names into boxes. These three areas, you probably gotta go do a little work. Here are 10 people to pick from and let the resource managers go focus their time and attention not being an admin, but really kind of doing some of the interaction with the people that are gonna do the work. Talking to the delivery managers really starts to get a beat on how do we do a better job of strategically staffing that particular project. And by the way, paying attention to employee wants and needs as part of that cycle as well. So we think it's a lot more of the industry starting to mature, people are starting to want more from their tools, and they should, and I think a part of the industry is absolutely ready for this.

It'll be interesting to see because it still shocks me today because you mentioned earlier that you still got people coming in saying I don't have anything for resource management, it’s still doing spreadsheets. It's pretty shocking to me, and it must be shocking to you. I don't get it, how we can be in 2022, and we still have companies that are there. Now maybe it's that small company that starts up and is growing so fast and they just didn't catch up with that and stuff like that. But the company's been around 15, 20 years and they have no resource management process. Wow, I just don't know how that happens in today's environment because it's hard to compete in today's environment. If you can't manage 75% of your cost base in a super efficient way, I don't know how you remain competitive. And so I think the automated staffing is gonna come along and it’s gonna get a lot of focus and that's why it got hit. And then you notice too, from the same report, there was a section there on skills tracking, and again, while the scores for skills tracking and forecasting got better, they're still not where they need to be. They have too high a percentage of people still saying I'm getting better support from that, but not quite where I wanna be. And I think one of the biggest turns of the crank that's occurred is this whole area of I gotta pay more attention not just to the financial needs of my project, but to the employee engagement needs of my projects as well. So that I get a better balance on how I assign people to work.

Brent Trimble: It is interesting. Again, our experience obviously is a platform. We get to talk to a really huge array of firms that are ascendant and they're maturing. And they’ve gone into the business to deploy innovation and client solutions and operations came later, so it's a very need-based conversation. And they know there are platforms and technology and processes that they need to mature. And then conversely, management consulting really started 20, 30 years ago, the notion of the staffing manager as a hybrid resource manager and that ascent in career and staffing people on projects and they're making pivots to more technology. Was on a call with a potential global partner a few weeks ago, and we were going through the platform and requirements and demonstrations. And it was interesting that they were prompting the notion of where's our R&D going with AI machine learning, and what types of forecasting were available.

Now thankfully we were able to show some of that, but interestingly, they're now probably understanding the value of the platform enabling a discipline like resource management, but really starting to push what the capabilities could be. The research is great and again, we encourage our listeners to go on the website, I think you said there are a few dozen artifacts there, past and present research to pour through. But as we look to your next rounds and as you're formulating ideas for your next surveys and testing the market and gaining insights, what kind of predictions do you see for next year? What do you think is gonna emerge as topics that are maybe a continuation of trends you've seen or things that you think will jump out?

Randy Mysliviec: Yeah, so probably the biggest one we think we're gonna see is the emergence of the gig marketplace, and I'd say it's not just the emergence because the gig marketplace emerged some number of years ago. But the latest data, I think I saw by the time 2023, almost half of our service-based workers are gonna be a source from some geek marketplace. Folks like myself, I've been in the business now for 40-something years. And when I came outta college, I expected to work for a company and probably worked for the same company for 30 or 40 years and have a stable work environment, all those kinds of things. The thought of working as an independent just never entered my mind.

Now over my career, I've had a couple opportunities to do that. But younger workers, if you look at the last two generations that are in the making today, half of them tell us in surveys “I'm very comfortable working as an independent, as opposed to working for some big company that's got an established set of benefits,” and those sorts of things. And just from what we've seen relative to the companies we're exposed to in the RMI, companies have not really grasped the fact that they're gonna have in the next two or three years, start to source 30, 40, 50% of their delivery resources from a gig marketplace. That has all kinds of implications, and those folks are not in my ecosystem, so I don't have the chance to be the one to train them, to build our cultural values around them. And today, generally speaking, you'll see anywhere from 10 to 20% of a typical delivery organization’s population, and that presents complications in and of itself because I gotta know who are those third parties, and what's my deal with them? How do I train them? I got insurance things and contracts, it's complicated.

So in every project, 10 to 20% of your resources are coming from someplace outside your four walls. That's complicated, we'll just take that and double that number and ask yourself are you prepared for that? Because that's what's coming, and if you can't get there with that, what you're gonna end up is you're gonna have big scarcities of delivery resources you need to do your projects. And so this whole area of third party outreach, gig marketplace, how do I bring that capability into my environment, both process and automation technologies. And like these gig marketplaces do, are we gonna connect automatically to them? Or okay, I need five people, I don't have them, I'm gonna go over to HR who currently has the access to that gig marketplace, tell them to look for those five people, and let me know when they found five people. Today we see those two coming together, and there's gonna need to be either built in capabilities in those tool sets to do some of that external outreach. And or I've gotta have connectors to some of these established gig marketplaces. There's a whole bunch of them out there today so that I can have them be a fluid source of people for my own employee base.

And I think, Brent, you serve lots of customers, you know that's a big reach for a lot of companies today, and that's one thing we see organizations just haven't done well and they're struggling with this. Okay, is that my responsibility now in delivery, or is that still HR, where does that fit? We see a little struggle going on in the enterprises around that. And so you ask about what's coming in the future, I think of the next three, five years, one of the things we'll be talking about more than anything else is companies that successfully figured out how to broaden their ability to get qualified talent through a combination of employees in a bigger element or proportion of that base coming from third parties of some sort.

Brent Trimble: And most likely the technology as a conduit to bring those together, to have that data at your finger.

Randy Mysliviec: Well, absolutely. The technology is there, and then there's a second one I'll mention, and I don't know if we have bragging rights or not, but when we formed the institute, we wanted to accelerate the maturation of the industry in how it embraces resource management. And so if you reeled back 10 years and looked on LinkedIn or some tool and search for resource managers, there just weren’t too many people that even had that title in their role. Today you go on to LinkedIn and key in the word resource manager for those two words, and you'll just get literally thousands of them. But interesting enough is that the need for resource managers has far outstripped the industry's current ability to grow new resource managers. They're just not there, and in the last year, we've got more calls, letters, inbounds asking for help, and companies saying I can't find resource managers. And then we ask why, and they tell us two things, they're growing the size of their RMO functions because they started to recognize more value from it. And then the poaching has begun, companies can't find RMs, they just go out and they're offering more money to get these people to jump ship from one place to another. And we're seeing an awful lot of that because we know where a lot of these people are because they came to school with us and they're part of the RMI. I've never seen turnover in titles and jobs in a single role that we're seeing in the resource management thing today.

So the message we're trying to send to people is we would prefer the industry not create any more churn than it's already creating because all it's doing is raising the cost of resource management for everybody. What we would prefer that the industry do is go find good people who fit the profile of a good resource manager. Good organizational or analytical skills, they've got good soft skills, they can interface with different people. Have some delivery background, the attributes, irrespective of whether or not you have any training in the RM process, are you capable of doing the job. And then get them to training, whether you get them our training or you train them internally on your own process is probably not as important. And get resource managers trained to do the job and then teach them how to use good automation tools and put those together. But we're pushing a grow-from-within right now because we're gonna see a continuing shortage.

There's a shortage today that's gonna get worse before it gets better. And we think probably 2023/ 2024 is where it will peak. And then as the industry finally grows enough new resource managers, we'll find that it'll start to stabilize. And that bodes well for us, we're putting record numbers of people through the training program and we're seeing more and more come in and it's helpful for us. But we'd encourage organizations to think internally, if you're looking for resource managers, go find those talented people and build them a resource career path and do some of the things you would've done for your project managers or delivery managers or other people in your companies. And actually, I just wrote a four-part article that's gonna come out on How to Retain the Best Resource Managers and I'll be talking about some of the things I just mentioned here in this podcast.

Brent Trimble: That's a great summary and a great look forward into the future of this as a capability, both for firms who need to grow it from within as well as individuals who are looking at this as a great career path forward. And to recap, if everything that Randy's been talking about is of interest, whether you are a firm, beginning this journey of maturation and evolution with resource management, or you are mature, and need more capacity and looking for a way to career path those individuals, all the research we referenced today is available at the Institute's website. And it's always a pleasure to have you on the broadcast. I'm sure this won't be the last time. So for users who are interested in the research we discussed today, or becoming a member of the resource management Institute, you can click on the link in the description of the podcast and go to their website resourcemanagementinstitute.com. But thank you so much for joining today, giving us a look at what you glean from the recent research, as well as a peak of the future.

Randy Mysliviec: Hey Brent, can’t thank you enough for giving me an opportunity to share some of this. I hope it's been helpful and always a pleasure, looking forward to our next podcast.

Brent Trimble: That'll be great. And for our listeners, for ideas or feedback or questions, always feel free to reach out to us at podcast@kantata.comfor any follow up questions for our guests, including Randy, and suggestions for future episodes. So thank you again for listening and Randy, thanks again for being a guest.

Randy Mysliviec: Thanks for having me.