Staffing Routine with Operating

The Routine

1. Make sure everyone who brings in new work (sales team, key account managers) knows when you’re having the weekly staffing meeting. Share the agenda ahead of time (see below).

   • Share the basics on how to add new work to everyone – at first, adding upcoming plans may feel intimidating but it’s the best practice! Just be ruthless about archiving far-fetched tentative ideas, because only probable client needs deserve to be in the list.

2. Lead the staffing meeting with Operating visible to everyone (on a big screen or screen-sharing in a video call). Zoom in (with cmd/ctrl + if needed). If someone is unable to attend, process their cases to the best of your knowledge.

3. Keep adding and editing work allocations and tentative ideas in Operating throughout the week. Extend confirmed allocations if ongoing work continues into the future.

   1. Remind and motivate consultants to update their plans regularly: when doing so, they will be reached out when the opportunity arises, and the company’s capacity forecast is accurate. This makes it easier to recruit their next colleague at the right time!

4. Use Slack or Teams to share what’s going on – link to Operating if major decisions are made outside the recurring meetings – ideally, the “Monday routine” is never surprising or confusing – much more of a “shared understanding” session, helping you focus and align the efforts.

5. That’s it, that’s the routine.

The Agenda

Agenda for a weekly recurring staffing session, e.g. on Monday at 11-12.

1. Projects to be staffed (team setup + allocations)

2. People with availability

3. Capacity forecast + conclusions

For the first couple of times this will take a little bit longer, but once you get into the habit, a 60-minute meeting should be enough. Remembering to do Step 0 will keep the meeting tight.

STEP 0

• If you have new tentative allocations in your accounts, add those as tentative in Operating before the session

• If you’ve connected your CRM, remember to refresh the connection to get the most up-to-date cases to Operating

  • Match projects with their owners and groups under project details in Horizon.

STEP 1 / approx 20 minutes

• Discuss each project to be staffed: all tentative needs in Operating Horizon, top to bottom

  • The horizon toggle “Open / All” should be left Open, otherwise you have a long list of ongoing confirmed work filling your screen. Sort the list either by CRM pipeline status or by Owner.

  • See which roles would fit the need best (in terms of role and skills) ⇒ build the team setup for every case that is on the horizon. Your best guess is good enough.

  • Decide on the names for the teams that must be decided – make sure you communicate with every team member and arrange time for preparations before the work begins (e.g. schedule an internal kick-off).

• Move over to the Staff timeline and decide which projects should be scheduled now

  • The Staff timeline shows you both the projects and the people, allowing you to see who’s available and fits the team setup

  • Add names to all roles that don’t have names yet

  • Best practice: if you know the project duration, paint the allocations. If the project gets postponed, reschedule the start date – that will shift all allocations accordingly.

  • Assign action points, who contacts whom

  • Confirm cases when you’re sure

  • Archive lost cases, discuss if the freed up people could fit other potential projects

• Ask everyone attending: anything that’s missing from the staffing puzzle? You can always add new projects from the bottom left + button. (If you add a project to Operating and only afterwards to your CRM, you will have two items of the same thing, right? Just merge projects into each other and you’re good.)

• Is it clear who owns each tentative case? (Add notes and change owner if necessary)

  • Be honest about things that aren’t happening – move them further into the future or archive them (from project details). Operating stores the data about what you had planned. Keep the list clean, don’t let unrealistic deals rot there.

STEP 2 / approx 20 minutes

• Discuss each person with free availability – which is the default sorting in Operating Staff, top to bottom

  • If you added rough ideas for everything on the projects side, many people should have tentative ideas on their row

  • Discuss: how might the people with free time help you win those sales cases? Help with proposals, prepare for interviews, get ready so that they could hit the ground running

  • If and when there are people with nothing on their row, where could they contribute? Open their profiles, discuss if they could follow up regarding past projects, or help their colleagues, even if it’s not all billable

  • “Push people away from the bench” rather than waiting for someone to pull them into a project.

  • Assign action points: who contacts whom

STEP 3 / approx 10 minutes

• Look at the Capacity view together

  • What does the amount of booked capacity tell you? Is there enough billable work, healthy amount of tentative cases – after all, you rarely win 100% of proposals sent

  • Is your sales in balance: are you actively proposing the different offering areas? (Scroll down to the table with different roles. See the same data grouped to Roles, Groups or People.)

  • Recruiting new people might take a few months, should you speed up recruitment efforts for some roles? Which skills are the most important for the new hire to have? (use Capacity view filters.)

  • Assign action points

(You should now have about 10 minutes for admin and taking a break before your next meeting.)

Downloadable version

Here’s the same Staffing Routine as a downloadable PDF: