Resource Management Software

Proper resource planning (ie: staffing, capacity planning) is the bedrock of almost every forecast done in a professional services firm. If our resource management processes are contributing to incorrect or misleading resource plans, our understanding of simple things like revenue forecasts, utilization, and when to hire are inherently flawed and therefore lead to poor business decisions. 

A weekly meeting cadence provides the right amount of discipline to capture these changes and put forth the most up to date forecast available. We recommend a clear agenda centered around resolving resource conflicts starting with your highest priority accounts. 

Planning in a professional services business naturally exists in a very fluid environment. Project plans change by the day as new information is uncovered and client priorities change. In order to reflect a proper forecast we need to capture these changes weekly prior to joining our resourcing meeting. 

The relationship between what we thought was going to happen (plans) against what actually happened (actuals) is one of the best tools at your disposal for validating the strength of your forecasts. The process of identifying and reacting to these variances should match your cadence of collecting timesheets and happen each week after doing so. 

The goal is to see out as far as we can by making weekly adjustments to everything we know. However, the further out we look the more variation we can expect. By focusing on the next 6-8 weeks and validating that your team has enough to work on (and verifying no one is about to burn out) you’ll be working off of the most accurate information at your disposal and ensuring you get ahead of any major issues. 

Managing your team’s capacity and therefore utilization requires a disciplined process that generates the best picture available of what the future might hold for us. Managing the myriad variables between sales and delivery is inherently challenging. Organizations often invent processes to make sense of it all, but just end up adding more labor to the problem which creates an even hazier picture. The best practices are simple: don’t overcomplicate by reinventing good hygiene and democratize the load across the organization. Everyone plays a role in good forecasting.

A 10 piece puzzle is infinitely easier to solve than a 1,000 piece puzzle and resource planning is no different. Managing a fragmented resourcing picture leads to an out of date and inaccurate look into your forecast as the amount of time to keep all of those pieces up to date is a barrier to updating. The goal should be frequent, high-level updates that capture the ever changing needs of the projects. Precision is the enemy of accuracy. 

We’re playing the game of trying to predict the future, and humans are inherently bad at it. We need a way of verifying that our prediction of what was going to happen actually happened, and time tracking is the easiest way to do that. The diligence in weekly time tracking allows you to get a new set of facts in each week that you can use to dial in your forecast and drive up confidence in your decision making.