Overview

Video - 1 minute - introduction to roles & seniority levels

Roles are the top level of your competence split. Don’t confuse this with Skills. For our example IT consulting company, this might be the role split:

• Software Developer

• Designer

• Project Manager

• Strategist

Then, a copywriter might have dozens of skills related to different skill categories:

• language proficiency: german, french

• industry experience: hospitality, travel

• technical skills: ChatGPT, localization

• people skills: facilitation, interviews

Primary Role

Everyone in the team has one primary role. This is to help make reporting sensible. People then might also have additional roles.

You can use primary role for filtering and grouping data around Operating.

• Display → Group by: Primary Role

Primary role determines the position’s rate, unless specified otherwise

In this project, we have three positions in the team setup: a project manager, a designer, and an unspecified role.

The rate that is used for each position is determined differently:

• Margaret Hamilton is doing Project Manager work here – it does not matter what her role (primary or not) is. This position role defines the rate used in the rate card. The purple little dot next to the rate “130 US$/h” hints at the fact that the Project Manager rate was found and used from the rate card.

• The second position is an unnamed Designer, and the rate is coming from the rate card’s Designer rate – 111 per hour.

• The third position doesn’t specify the role – it’s Abbie Crosby – and her Primary Role defines the rate.

• We could of course set the rate even more specifically and add a position-specific rate.

Seniority levels

A seniority level is always tied to a role, and they don’t work independently. I.e. someone is a senior martech consultant.

Planning the team setup on the Horizon

When you’re planning the team setup in Operating Horizon, we recommend choosing the role first for each position in the team:

Having set the team (and optionally, required skills), you can already get suggestions who the best match for the position might be.

This way, even before you know exactly who will be working on the project and when, your Horizon and Reports start to give you a clue of what’s to be expected in the coming months.

Piece by piece, you’re building the business forecast, informing the recruitment team, highlighting which roles (and skills) are in demand – and which are not.

Using seniority level to suggest the right people for an open position

On the Horizon tab, and on the project details page, you can suggest right people for a position based on their role and seniority level. Note that as seniority is always tied to a role, just searching for “Juniors” won’t yield any relevant matches.

Billable and non-billable roles

Work done by people with non-billable primary role will be considered non-billable unless specified otherwise.

Rates and costs

You can defined charge-out rates and cost rates for your people based on their role and seniority level.

Read more here.

Add roles and seniority levels for a position on a project

By adding the role and seniority level for a position on a project, you can:

• Let Operating suggest available people for that position in the Horizon view

• Forecast your capacity for roles and seniority levels without naming a specific person for the role