Become better at resourcing with our guide for professional services businesses, diving into best practices and advice from our experts.
All companies do resource planning. Teams may call it staffing, scheduling, capacity planning, or talent allocation, but if your business relies on skilled people to deliver client work (which all professional services organizations do), you're doing resource management.
In our recent webinar, Resourcing for Success: Best Practices Every Manager Should Know, Christine Robinson and Nora Fleischhut shared some of the must-dos for successful resource planning. Below, we’ve unpacked those learnings into a practical resource planning guide for professional services.
Are you considering starting resource planning because something isn’t working? Whether that’s uneven workloads, slipping deadlines, reactive hiring, or unexpectedly high turnover, you’re not alone.
Professional services resource management provides many benefits, but to secure buy-in from leadership and team members, you need to frame it correctly. Leaders may consider it an unnecessary operational chore, while employees used to managing their own assignments may see it as micromanagement.
Here are some of the benefits of resource planning for professional services firms, to help you reframe it as a strategic driver.
As Christine rightfully noted during our webinar, "The fundamentals of resource management are industry agnostic." Whether you’re building new software or providing accountancy advice, resource planning has the same goal: to maximize the potential of resources and help businesses reach their goals.
Resource planning isn’t something you do for its own sake. It’s done for the greater interest of the company and its people, to help optimize processes and reach strategic goals.
A successful resource management function is not successful, because resource management is successful, it's successful because it is allowing the organization to be successful through the resource management platform, allowing the process to be agile and nimble as the organization meets its organizational goals, says Christine.
At the same time, resource planning doesn’t just benefit the organization. Nor is it just about making sure everyone is busy. It’s about looking after employees, too.
The best resource managers get to know their 'resources' (the human capital) and understand what they live and breathe. When RMs know what kind of work excites their team, what motivates them, they can make their time with the company more enjoyable and beneficial both on a personal and professional level.
Needless to say, communication is key here. Before you open your resource planning guide and begin making allocations, you need to know what it is they are actually passionate about, what kind of projects, roles, or teams they would like to be part of. This is how to build a motivated, high-performing workforce and maximize everyone's potential.
Employee turnover is unavoidable. But smart resource planning can help you reduce turnover rates and keep good talent for as long as possible.
Resource planning has a huge impact on retention; while there are many reasons why people choose to leave, companies can mitigate unnecessary resignations by avoiding unsustainable workloads, making considered allocations, and creating plans for career growth.
Taking such measures will not only help you hold onto the talent but also secure successful project delivery, decrease uncertainty, and increase project stability.
What's more, large organizations with hundreds of resources and multiple projects running at the same time might actually enjoy more flexibility when it comes to resource planning.
For example, if a high-performing engineer wants to move with their family and you have an exciting project in their new region that could benefit from their skillset, thoughtful planning can take a potential resignation and turn it into a win for both the employee and the business.
So, how does resource planning support career growth? When professional services firms work with their resources well, the two go hand in hand.
When creating a resource management plan, you don't just look at your people’s capacity and availability. You also need to consider their skills and passions, growth needs, and individual requests.
Many resource managers come from HR backgrounds for this reason, because they know how to establish trusting relationships, allowing them to help ensure people work on the things they are passionate about, grow within their roles, and meet their career aspirations.
Successful resource capacity planning is no one person’s job. Nor does the onus rest on one team.
It requires alignment across leadership, delivery, operations, finance, and your people, meaning it’s important to get their buy-in and seamlessly integrate your new approach into existing ways of working. Here’s how.
In order to succeed in resource planning, your leadership needs to fully support the initiative and understand the strategic benefits it can bring to the company. Remember, this isn’t just about operations, but hitting strategic goals, too.
Convincing leadership to invest in resource planning is a challenging but worthwhile task. Our advice is to focus on outcomes:
As Christine advises:
Paint the picture for leadership of how the resource management function is going to benefit the organization, is going to align to whatever their strategic objectives are. For example, if you're speaking with a leader who is focused on doubling the footprint of their practice, that's key information that's important to know. How can you help them achieve that? Understand how they are planning to have some sort of a strategy.
Your resourcing value proposition pitch should consider the entire business – not just leadership. The people you’re managing should be able to see how your goals align with their interests.
For instance, for top performers who constantly get overbooked, the promise of a sustainable workload is a powerful benefit. For leaders in very volatile businesses, it might look like plans for stability, reducing constant business risks.
Once you’ve set the stage for successful resource planning and made sure every individual stakeholder understands how it’ll benefit them, resistance will quickly drop.
Keep reading: A Value Proposition for Resource Management 👉
Effective resource planning is not only done for the greater good of the company, but also for the people growing the business. That means personal connections are key to successful resource planning.
Resource or project managers should only start capacity planning once they’ve taken the time to understand their people, whether insights come from in-person conversations or profile recaps by their resource planning tool.
After several years spent working in resource management and studying resource management processes, Christine notes:
The resources that are being managed are people, and so establishing that relationship with the people that are very talented, that are being aligned in different ways, and really understanding how they are motivated and what they aspire to, that's going to be the key to success across the board. Again, an industry agnostic best practice, truly listening. So having a keen and acute understanding of what the pulse is of the organization, what is driving people right now, what are they looking for, in terms of perhaps diversity of experience or the evolution of where they are in their career?
In other words, cherish your data. If there's one question many resource managers in the professional services industry ask, it’s “How do I explain the value of time tracking without sounding controlling?”
When asked to fill in timesheets, employees may wonder why they need to track their time or feel micromanaged as they need to keep their schedules up-to-date all the time.
The solution? Emphasize its purpose. Contrary to popular belief, time tracking is not just about being able to see how much time is being spent on specific tasks. This data is invaluable when making educated predictions about upcoming projects, estimating completion dates, and understanding how many billable hours will be required to deliver the project successfully.
Project time tracking is also a great way to avoid overloading your people. When you know how many hours are required for a project, it becomes simple to estimate how many assignments you’ll need – avoiding unnecessary overtime and overutilized resources.
Resource planning in professional services is ridden with uncertainty, change, and stressful situations, usually due to shifting scopes, new requests, evolving timelines, and unexpected absences.
So, the sooner you get comfortable with uncertainty, the quicker you’ll begin adapting to these weekly (or daily) changes.
Knowing how to handle force majeures is crucial for successful resource planning, but tools that support scenario planning help enormously. Reliable project management software will reduce the volume of stress coming your way by modeling the impact of staffing decisions and timeline shifts.
Christine agrees:
The ability to be comfortable with the unknown is paramount. If you're the type of individual who really enjoys having a mapped out layout of exactly how your day is going to go, or you become very flustered if one piece is out of context, this is probably not the field for you. Successful resource managers are able to roll with the punches. And being comfortable with this sort of the Rubik's cube of the situation, it's having that personality where there is a puzzle that you're putting together, but you don't have all the pieces and you're trying your best, and you're gonna put something together, - says Christine.
Doing your resource planning in Excel (which you really shouldn't) can only get you so far. Today’s professional services businesses need real-time data, skills visibility, and responsiveness to change.
Wondering what you should look for in resource planning software? Here’s a quick guide:
And why move away from spreadsheets? For starters, updating spreadsheets takes time, and the right software will mean your RMs are not tied down with mundane administrative tasks that can easily be automated by the right tool. They also can’t show live data, support cross-team planning, or help you model different scenarios.
Go deeper: To see how modern tools solve these gaps, explore how teams use Runn for resource planning 💡
What's more, achieving a truly strategic approach to resource planning becomes an uphill battle, considering the amount of data you need to process on a daily basis. As delivery scales and your plans become more complex, you'll be more reliant on your resource data.
Christine adds a caution many teams need to hear, advising that businesses must take the time to choose the tool that aligns well with their needs and ways of working:
Get a tool that can meet you where you are - not only in terms of the capability that you need from it from an organizational standpoint, but also where your organization is in its maturity path, and in terms of what data is even available in your organization. I've seen leaders and resource managers alike fall in love with the idea of a shiny new tool that is going to solve the world and all the problems.
Now, there are some really nice tools out there that do some pretty cool things. And I am a huge supporter of investing in your own toolbox. But what I would say is a word of caution. You can't just get a tool and go off to the races and expect everything to work. You need continuous iteration. The tool is just a base. You need leadership buy-in, continuous improvement, constant check-ins. You need to understand your people, and understand the direction of the business. That's what's needed to drive a really successful resource management function.
Resource planning is ultimately about creating an environment where your people can thrive, and your projects can succeed, not by chance, but by design.
Ready to get started with your human resource planning? There might be just one thing you're missing!
