Keys to Success

Improving utilization is one of the toughest challenges in any Professional Service Organization.

Most firms have a vision for improving utilization, but they struggle with balancing short-term firefighting, long-term pipelines, and mixed utilization rates of employees.

For most companies, the challenge is that they do not have an overview of their resource situation. At the very best, firms have local spreadsheets for small departments, but no corporate overview.

We offer the following initiatives to help you to increase successful resource management.

Initiative	Description
Get management attention	Set the right foundation for resource planning—this requires discipline, so be clear on processes and goals—and get management’s attention to this; otherwise, companies tend to stay on the same course.
Apply simple project planning	Make planning simplified—assign at the project level and by week. Goal number one is to achieve a corporate resource overview. Do not focus on project management, but purely on project planning to achieve the corporate resource overview.
Remove Excel spreadsheets and apply corporate overview	Department Managers protect their resources by maintaining their own overviews. Eliminate local spreadsheets, and move to one corporate solution.
First focus on short term then on long term planning	The first priority is to get a resource overview for the coming three to four months to see where there is over-utilization and under-utilization. Then you should focus on long-term planning and include your pipeline projects in the resource overviews.
Engage people	People are more likely to achieve higher utilization when they are engaged in the planning of the assignments they are working on. When all of the preceding steps are completed, engage people in the planning.