The 4 essential elements to take into account for a good resource planning in council
When you need to manage a resource planning with several dozen consultants, each of whom has limited availability, are working on several projects and that it is necessary to take into account leave, skills, experience and even appetites, resource planning are quickly starting to look like a chess game between Byrne and Fischer (for the connoisseurs)! And yet, there are 4 essential elements to take into account so that the resource planning consultants is optimal.
- 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 customer projects on which employees are staffed, but also the projects that are close to being won for which a resource planning will allow the assignment 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 next to the others, so as to allocate a consultant to a client mission rather than the internal project. Obviously, availability must take into account leave 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 resource planning to integrate this period of non-work. 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 to each consultant, or conversely the rate of resource planning. It is with this visibility that we can take
The right trade-offs and the right decisions of resource planning that promote utilization rate and a
Improved profitability for the entire firm.
2. Skills
Filtering the workforce by ranks 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 the subcontractors, if you regularly work with a pool of external consultants. To do this, you need to list the key skills you will be researching and assign 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-evaluate.
Following each project, a profile review and an adjustment of skills and grades must be carried out to keep the profiles up to date. To the extent that you have a less regular interaction with your subcontractors, it is more difficult to do regular skills assessments. It is therefore necessary to 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 staffed on 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 customer on the company's ability to respond to its problems.
It is therefore possible to segment the workforce through divisions. But this impermeable mode can have an undesirable effect on the motivations of the workforce. All consultants are curious and want to discover new horizons to learn new skills and break the monotony. It is therefore preferable to offer a varied but consistent 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 a high turnover. Attrition is between 15% and 20%, or even more in some sectors of consulting (marketing in particular). Retaining employees by motivating them is therefore a key part of a consulting firm's strategy. The costs of training, the impact on culture, the loss of knowledge are too important not to carry out actions that promote the retention of your consultants.
Giving employees a voice in the choice of their projects can therefore 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 suffer, but the skills of your workforce will progress with the possibility of diversifying their experience.
If you can bring these 4 dimensions together,
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 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. Learn more about
Stafiz, an ERP for consulting
