Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I started working with a B2B startup last year, the brief was straightforward: revamp their website. But as I dove deeper into their operations, I discovered something that most businesses overlook - their resource allocation was completely broken.
Every project felt like a firefight. The CEO was personally assigning tasks via Slack DMs. Project managers were updating spreadsheets manually. Nobody knew who was working on what, and everything was constantly behind schedule. Sound familiar?
What I discovered changed everything: most companies think resource planning is about tools, when it's actually about systems. The startup I worked with had tried every project management platform you can think of - Asana, Monday, Notion, you name it. None of them solved the real problem.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience implementing automated resource planning workflows:
Why traditional project management fails at scale (and what to do instead)
The 3-layer automation system that eliminated manual task assignment
How we reduced project bottlenecks by 60% without hiring anyone
The surprising reason why most resource planning tools make things worse
A step-by-step framework you can implement in any business
This isn't about adopting another SaaS tool - it's about fundamentally rethinking how work gets assigned and tracked in your organization.
Reality Check
What everyone thinks automated resource planning means
When most startup founders hear "automated resource planning," they immediately think about buying software. Walk into any growing company and you'll see the same pattern: they've tried Asana, switched to Monday, experimented with Notion, maybe even paid for enterprise features.
The conventional wisdom goes like this:
Buy a project management tool - Something with Gantt charts, time tracking, and resource allocation features
Set up automated workflows - Create templates and rules that assign tasks automatically
Train your team - Get everyone to update their status and log their hours
Generate reports - Use dashboards to track utilization and project health
Optimize over time - Tweak the system based on data and feedback
This approach exists because it sounds logical and software vendors have convinced everyone that resource planning is a technology problem. Most consultants and agencies push this framework because it's easy to sell and implement.
But here's where it falls short: automation without understanding the real workflow creates more chaos, not less. I've seen teams spend months setting up elaborate project management systems only to go back to Slack DMs and email because the "solution" was more work than the problem.
The real issue isn't the tool - it's that most businesses don't actually understand what resources they have, what work needs to be done, and how those two things connect. You can't automate a process that doesn't exist.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The startup I worked with perfectly illustrated this problem. They had a team of 12 people across development, marketing, and operations. Every Monday, they'd have a planning meeting that lasted 2 hours where everyone would update their status and get new assignments.
The CEO would literally have a notebook where he'd write down who was doing what. By Wednesday, half the assignments had changed. By Friday, nobody knew what they were supposed to be working on. Projects that should have taken 2 weeks were stretching to 6 weeks, not because the work was hard, but because nobody knew who was supposed to do it.
My first instinct was typical - I suggested they implement a proper project management system. We spent two weeks setting up Asana with custom fields, automated workflows, and beautiful dashboards. I even trained the team on how to use it properly.
The result? Complete disaster.
People started updating Asana AND the old spreadsheet AND sending Slack messages to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. Instead of saving time, we'd tripled the administrative overhead. The CEO was more frustrated than ever because now he had three places to check for project status.
That's when I realized the fundamental problem: we were trying to automate chaos instead of creating order first. The issue wasn't that they needed better software - they needed to understand what they were actually trying to optimize.
Most businesses make this same mistake. They assume that if they can just find the right tool and set up the right automations, their resource planning problems will disappear. But automation amplifies whatever system you already have. If your system is broken, automation makes it break faster and more efficiently.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After the Asana experiment failed, I took a completely different approach. Instead of starting with tools, I started with understanding the actual work that needed to happen.
Step 1: Resource Audit (Week 1)
First, I mapped out what everyone was actually doing. Not what their job description said, but what they spent their time on. We tracked this for one week using nothing but a simple spreadsheet. Every hour, each person logged what they worked on in three categories: planned work, unplanned work, and administrative overhead.
The results were shocking. Almost 40% of everyone's time was spent on unplanned work - urgent requests, fixing things that broke, or waiting for information from someone else. Another 20% was administrative overhead - updating systems, attending status meetings, or looking for information.
Step 2: Workflow Mapping (Week 2)
Next, I documented how work actually flowed through the organization. Not the org chart or the process documentation - the real paths that tasks took from idea to completion. I discovered that every project touched an average of 6 people, but only 3 of them actually did work. The other 3 were approval, coordination, or information-sharing touchpoints.
This revealed the core problem: most of their "resource planning" challenges were actually communication and coordination problems. People weren't slow at doing work - they were slow at figuring out what work to do and when it was their turn to do it.
Step 3: The Three-Layer Automation System
Based on this understanding, I built a simple three-layer system:
Layer 1: Work Intake - Instead of random Slack requests, we created a single form for all new work requests. This form automatically categorized requests and estimated effort based on similar past projects.
Layer 2: Resource Allocation - Rather than the CEO manually assigning tasks, we created rules based on current workload, skill match, and project priority. If someone was over 80% capacity, new work automatically went to the next available person.
Layer 3: Progress Tracking - Instead of status meetings and manual updates, we integrated progress tracking into the tools people already used. When a developer marked a ticket as complete, it automatically triggered the next step and notified the right person.
The key insight was that we didn't need people to change their behavior - we needed to create systems that worked with their natural behavior and automated the coordination parts.
System Design
We mapped actual workflow patterns instead of ideal processes, revealing that 60% of delays came from handoffs, not capacity
Automation Rules
Simple if-this-then-that logic based on workload and skill match eliminated 90% of manual task assignment
Integration Strategy
Connected automation to existing tools rather than forcing new software adoption
Measurement Framework
Tracked coordination time vs. execution time to optimize the right bottlenecks
The transformation was dramatic and measurable. Within 6 weeks of implementing the automated resource planning system:
Project completion time dropped by 60% - not because people worked faster, but because they spent more time actually working instead of figuring out what to work on. The average project that used to take 6 weeks now completed in 2.5 weeks.
Administrative overhead decreased by 45% - the weekly 2-hour planning meetings became 30-minute exception reviews. People stopped sending "what should I work on next?" Slack messages because the system told them automatically.
Team utilization improved from 60% to 85% - not because we worked people harder, but because we eliminated the dead time between tasks. People knew what to work on next before they finished their current task.
Most surprisingly, team satisfaction increased significantly. People felt more in control of their work because they could see the pipeline and plan accordingly. The CEO stopped being a bottleneck because the system handled routine allocation decisions automatically.
The startup went from constantly missing deadlines to consistently delivering projects early. They were able to take on 40% more client work without hiring additional staff, purely through better resource coordination.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
The biggest lesson was that resource planning automation is really workflow automation in disguise. Most companies focus on optimizing individual productivity when the real gains come from optimizing coordination between people.
Here are the key insights that apply to any business:
Audit before automating - You can't optimize what you don't understand. Spend a week tracking actual work patterns before choosing any tools.
Start with communication, not capacity - Most resource problems are coordination problems disguised as workload problems.
Automate handoffs, not work - The value is in eliminating the gaps between tasks, not speeding up the tasks themselves.
Work with existing behavior - Don't try to change how people work; change how work flows to people.
Measure coordination time separately - Track time spent figuring out what to do vs. actually doing it. The ratio should be 1:5 or better.
Keep humans in the exceptions - Automate the routine 80% but make sure complex decisions still go to people.
Start simple and add complexity gradually - Basic if-this-then-that rules work better than elaborate AI systems for most businesses.
The mistake I almost made was treating this as a technology project instead of a systems project. The tools matter, but understanding the actual work patterns matters more.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing automated resource planning:
Focus on engineering workflow automation first - development tasks have the clearest patterns
Integrate with your existing dev tools rather than adding new project management layers
Use customer support ticket volume to predict resource needs automatically
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses implementing automated resource planning:
Start with inventory and fulfillment workflows - these have predictable patterns
Automate seasonal resource allocation based on historical sales data
Connect customer service workload to order volume for automatic staffing adjustments