Even A Slight Mismatch In Skills Can Cost Your Consulting Firm Money
At a basic level, managing your resources is about putting available consultants to work on projects, and keeping them busy. But effective resource planning is much more than just scheduling. You must find the match between consultant and project that makes financial sense AND is an appropriate use of their skills. If you don’t schedule the right consultants to work on the right projects, you are costing your firm money, and possibly hurting your client relationships.
The Right Person On The Wrong Work
Assigning a senior person to a junior-level task is an unnecessary waste of money. An extreme example would be scheduling a $150/hour consultant to do work that a junior level consultant ($50/hour) could have done for 20 hours. This mistake would have wasted $2000 simply because the senior-level person was available and you didn’t have accurate visibility into the junior-level resources availability. Typically, mismatching higher level consultants on lower level work is less extreme, but more frequent if you do not have the right view into availability and costs when you are planning.
The Wrong Person On The Right Work
On the other hand, assigning work to a consultant who lacks the skill needed for the project can cause delays and rework, hurting or even eliminating project profitability. In addition, rework and delays cause client frustration, which can lead to more difficult renewals and upsells. If you see rework cropping up, it might not be an underperforming consultant - it may be a skill mismatch caused by inefficient planning.
Find The Right Match With Skill Mapping
Resource planning software like Projectworks enables you to match project requirements with consultant’s skills, rate and availability. In addition to seniority level/rate, you can tag each consultant on your staff with specific skills and talents. And when a new project needs to be assigned, you can use the matching feature to find the best available fit. This not only saves time during the resource planning process, it guards your profitability by automatically optimizing the match for the most cost effective, qualified consultant for that work. Your projects will be completed more efficiently, your clients will be happier, and your consulting staff will be less stressed.
If you are ready to go from basic project scheduling to resource planning and save your margins, you can start with a free trial of Projectworks, or let us demo Projectworks for you, and you will see how switching from spreadsheets to software can help your projects become more profitable and your clients happier.
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In a recent Projectworks Podcast episode, Doug Taylor (who co-founded Provoke and scaled it to 150 staff) sat down with Mark Orttung (who took Nexient from $30m to $130m). Together, they co-wrote The $50 Million Consulting Firm, and in this episode they shared a collection of lessons they wish they'd had earlier when scaling their software consulting firms.
Novigi has an impressive story. Since launching in 2016, they’ve scaled to 550 staff across six offices and two countries, while becoming the fastest-growing professional services firm on the AFR Fast 100 - their story is worth studying.
”When new work comes in, we have the right people, ready to go. Winning work and protecting the team, we never have to choose just one.” How often can you confidently say the same? Facing resourcing questions about upcoming projects can sound simple, but if your schedules are built on assumptions and capacity is only estimated, face it, your resource planning is under-engineered!
