THE resource planning in advice: 4 essential elements to take into account (2021)

The 4 essential elements to take into account for a good resource planning in advice

When you have to manage a resource planning with several dozen consultants, each of whom has limited availability, working on several projects and that it is necessary to take into account leave, skills, experience and even appetites, decisions of resource planning quickly begin to resemble a chess game between Byrne and Fischer (for those in the know)!

And yet, there are 4 essential elements to take into account so that the resource planning consultants is optimal.

1. Availability

Knowing each employee's availability over the next few days, weeks or months is an essential prerequisite. Availability must not only take into account the customer projects on which employees are staffed, but also projects close to being won for which a temporary resource planning will enable the mission to start on time to meet the deadlines imposed by the customer.

Frequently, consultants also spend part of their time on internal projects. The resource planning of these projects should be clearly displayed alongside the others, so as to allocate a consultant to a customer assignment rather than the internal project.

It goes without saying that availabilities must take leave into account as soon as it has been validated. If leave is taken during the course of a project, the project manager will probably need to be informed and adjust his resource planning to take account of this non-working period. Ideally, beyond the clearly identified projects on which each employee is staffed, it is interesting to see at a glance the number of days available for each consultant, or conversely the rate of resource planning. It's with this visibility that we can make the right arbitrages and decisions at resource planning , which will promote higher utilization rate and greater profitability for the firm as a whole.

2. Skills

Filtering staff by grade or role is a first step, but it's not enough. It is important to have access to the profiles of each internal consultant, as well as those of subcontractors, if you regularly work with a pool of external consultants. To do this, you need to list the key competencies you'll be researching, and assign each employee between 5 and 10 competencies, with ratings for each. You can ask their manager to rate each skill, or possibly ask staff to self-assess.

Following each project, a profile review and adjustment of skills and grades should be carried out to keep profiles up to date. As you interact less regularly with your subcontractors, it is more difficult to carry out regular skills assessments. You need to give them access to their profiles so that they can update them regularly.

3. Experience

In the consulting sector, ensuring that at least some of the staff working on a project have previous experience in the customer's business sector is a necessary element in ensuring the success of a project, over and above the importance of reassuring the customer of the company's ability to respond to its problems.

It is therefore possible to segment the workforce into clusters. But this impermeable mode can have an undesirable effect on workforce motivation. All consultants are curious and want to discover new horizons to learn new skills and break the monotony. It is therefore preferable to offer employees a varied but consistent experience. It's important to keep track of their project histories and the business sectors they've worked in, in order to offer this kind of management experience, which is so important to employees.

4. Appetite

The consulting industry is experiencing significant turnover. Attrition is between 15% and 20%, or even more in certain consulting sectors (marketing in particular). Retaining your employees by motivating them is therefore a key element in the strategy of a consulting firm. The training costs, the impact on culture, the loss of knowledge are too important not to take actions favorable to the retention of your consultants.

Giving employees a voice in the choice of their projects can therefore prove to be a very good operation. Let him propose 3 to 4 choices of project categories and sectors of activity in which he wishes to evolve. Not only will employee satisfaction be felt, but the skills of your workforce will progress with the possibility of diversifying their experience.

If you manage to combine these 4 dimensions - availability, skills, experience and appetite- then you will have won everything: you will be able to keep your employees satisfied, satisfy your customers, finish projects on time and optimize utilization rate.

THE resource planning is therefore a function to be taken very seriously because it is at the heart of the consulting firm's activity.

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