When EY, a global leader in multinational professional services, was searching for a new way to match talented consultants to critical projects, their leaders knew the only way to keep pace with change was a solution that paired their expertise with advanced technology.
At Eightfold, we jumped at the opportunity to build a new product that gives organizations like EY complete visibility into skills — the new language of work — to help match employees with the right projects at the right time. We knew that our skills-based approach could also work in a project-based world.
“As new skills emerge and old ones become irrelevant, businesses need to assess their current capabilities against future needs,” said Mike Bertolino, Global EY Skills Foundry Leader and People Advisory Services Contractor. “Deploying AI and advanced analytics is the best way to solve this pressing issue at pace and at scale.”
Enter Eightfold Resource Management, the latest product in the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform built for any organization that needs a more efficient, insightful, and inclusive way to manage project-based work.
Hear about EY’s vision to streamline its project-based assignments for employees.
Goodbye spreadsheets, hello Resource Management
By this point, we all know that the future of work is skills-based — jobs, roles, and projects will center around a person’s skills and their potential to learn new ones.
This new world of work will require a much deeper, real-time understanding of skills. Yet many organizations are still manually tracking skills, availability, booking times, and resources, relying on a person’s availability or previous knowledge of their skills to assign work. At best, this is an inexact science that leads to missed opportunities, suboptimal results, or not assigning the right people to the right projects.
It’s time to leave this spreadsheet approach behind — and move to an AI-powered solution to track projects and assign people to the right work. That’s why we partnered with EY and other customers to reimagine how project-based work should be done.
We applied our skills-based matching that we use across the platform to assign resources to projects. Traditionally, we’ve used this technology to match people to jobs — now we’re applying it to match people to projects.
As a result, Resource Management enables organizations to more intelligently and efficiently execute project-based work. By integrating with staffing availability and booking systems, we surface the best-possible fits for a project based on skill sets, availability, and other signals to allow resource managers to reserve the right resource’s time in a single centralized system.
In addition, as employees complete projects their updated skills and experience are reflected in the system, giving full visibility into their growth to fuel consideration for future projects.
Without a doubt, using AI-powered talent intelligence to pair people with projects gives organizations a full view of the entire talent bench — and the power to deploy people into the most beneficial and profitable places possible.
Planning projects just got easier with a unified view into skills that enables engagement and resource managers to see their employees’ skill sets and quickly pair them to the right work. It also empowers employees to grow their skills with better matching opportunities to new projects.
Related content: Here’s why everyone needs AI-powered talent intelligence in their HR tech stacks
How Resource Management works
The world of jobs is shifting to a skills-based approach, and project-based work can enjoy similar results. Now is the time to embrace skills and AI for project-based work to create a more efficient, intelligent process that benefits everyone in the organization.
Here’s how Resource Management works, based on four key tenets:
- It matches the right work to the right skills: Go beyond simple availability, location, or previous project data. Organizations can use a more in-depth understanding of people’s skills, adjacencies, and their potential to find the best-fit talent to work on any given project.
- It offers availability, skills, booking, and AI all in one system: Project management becomes more powerful and agile with skills intelligence. When combined with availability, booking systems, and other signals we provide a valuable and complete view of talent all in one place.
- It captures new and emerging skills in real-time: As employees complete projects, built-in workflows enable their project leads to assess their skills proficiency. Employees can also add any new skills they learned on a project to inform future opportunities.
- It improves time to staff: Enable resource managers to quickly take skills, availability, location, past engagements, and more into account so they can staff more projects more efficiently.
Why Resource Management
Resource Management is the latest product in our single AI platform for all talent, using our skills-based talent intelligence to power project-based work.
Much like managing an internal workforce, the future of managing project-based work will be based on skills intelligence. Taking a skills-based approach to resource management will ultimately lead to both a more equitable distribution of work and the highest quality work, whether that’s happening within your organization or on behalf of a client.
We’re proud to have partnered with EY and our customers on Resource Management, but now we’re even more excited about bringing this product to market for everyone. Take a closer look at Resource Management today to learn more about how it can streamline your organization’s project-based work planning — and say goodbye to manual processes forever.
Aashir Shroff is a seasoned product leader, gig economy expert, speaker, and author focused on using AI and technology to help organizations build a diverse and balanced workforce. Aashir is the Head of Product for Talent Acquisition, Talent Flex, and Resource Management at Eightfold, helping customers reimagine hiring strategies, develop contingent workforces, and enable project-based work. Prior to Eightfold, Aashir co-founded GigNow, an EY-backed startup that helped enterprises transform their contractor hiring experience.