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

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Shannon M October 22, 2019

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 the availability of each employee, in the coming days, weeks, months, is an essential prerequisite. Availability must not only take into account the client projects on which the employees are staffed, but also the projects close to being won for which a resource planning temporary will allow the mission to start on time to meet the deadlines imposed by the client. It often happens that consultants also spend part of their time on internal projects. THE resource planning of these projects must be clearly displayed alongside the others, so as, if necessary, to allocate a consultant to a client mission rather than the internal project. Obviously availability must take leave into account from the moment it is validated. If time off is taken during a project, the project manager probably needs to be informed and adjust his or her schedule. resource planning to integrate this non-working period. Ideally, beyond the clearly identified projects on which each collaborator is assigned, it is interesting to see at a glance the number of days available for each consultant, or conversely the rate of resource planning . It is with this visibility that we can make the right trade-offs and decisions resource planning which promote utilization rate and better profitability for the entire firm.

2. Skills

Filtering the workforce by grades or roles is a first approach but it remains insufficient. It is important to have access to the profiles of each internal consultant but also to those of subcontractors, if you regularly work with a pool of external consultants. To do this, you must list the key skills on which you are going to do your research and assign to each employee between 5 and 10 skills with ratings for each of them. You can ask their manager to rate each skill, or possibly ask the workforce to self-assess. Following each project, a review of the profile and an adjustment of skills and grades must be carried out to keep the profiles up to date. To the extent that you have less regular interaction with your subcontractors, it is more difficult to do regular skills assessments. You must therefore give them access to their profile so that they can update it regularly.

3. Experience

In the consulting sector, ensuring that at least part of the staff assigned to a project has already acquired experience in the client's sector of activity is a necessary element to ensure the success of a project, -beyond the importance of reassuring the client about the firm's ability to respond to their problems. It is therefore possible to segment the workforce through divisions. But this impervious mode can have an undesirable effect on the motivations of the workforce. All consultants are curious and want to discover other horizons to learn new skills and break the monotony. It is therefore preferable to offer a varied but coherent experience to employees. It is therefore necessary to keep the history of their projects and the details of the sectors of activity that they have experienced through their projects to offer this management method which is very important for 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 bring together these 4 dimensions, availability, skills, experience, and appetites, then you will have won everything: succeed in maintaining high employee satisfaction, satisfy your customers, finish projects on time and optimize the 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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