The Challenge

For a growing management consultancy, staffing sits at the heart of the business. The staffing team matches consultants to open positions across new and existing projects, with decisions required every week and, at times, almost every day.

The staffing function is led by a partner working alongside three project managers and an HR colleague. Because each member of the team combines staffing with other responsibilities and project work, having a dependable process and shared view of requests is particularly important.
For many years, the consultancy successfully managed resource planning through a SharePoint list and Excel reporting. As the business grew, however, the team reached the point where this approach could no longer provide the scale it needed.

One of the biggest challenges comes towards the end of each year. Consultants are generally planned to remain on a project for around one year, creating a significant rotation of resources, typically in late autumn or November. Managing this rotation created a substantial workload for the staffing team and exposed the limitations of the existing SharePoint and Excel approach.

“We managed for a long time with Excel and SharePoint… but it was just not scaling anymore.”

At a smaller scale, it was still possible for members of the staffing team to maintain a good understanding of who was available and retain much of that information themselves. As the organisation grew, that was no longer manageable in the same way. This created the need for a resource management system that could support more consultants, projects and staffing decisions.

Managing More Complex Resource Requirements

As the consultancy has grown, its staffing requirements have also become more complex. Consultants are increasingly specialised, and selecting the right person for a project can involve factors that are difficult to capture fully through standard skill descriptions alone. These can include language proficiency, analytical capabilities, personal skills and an individual’s suitability for a particular client or project environment.

The consultancy uses Retain’s skills information to support staffing decisions, with an opportunity to make greater use of skills-based requests as adoption develops. The staffing team combines information within the system with its own knowledge of individuals, clients and projects, helping it apply important context when making staffing decisions. The number of available consultants at any given point can also be relatively limited, helping the team focus quickly on the most appropriate options.

Introducing a Structured Workflow for Staffing Requests

One of the most important changes following the introduction of Retain has been the workflow for resource requests. The organisation did not have an equivalent request workflow within its previous SharePoint and Excel approach.

Resource requests from project managers can now be documented within the system. This helps the staffing team maintain oversight of requests and reduces the risk of information being lost or requests being missed.

“It solves the problem of potentially losing oversight or losing information when the requests come in from the project managers for resources.”

The workflow also supports collaboration within the staffing team. Every Friday, the team reviews its open staffing requests together. Having those requests documented means everyone within the staffing team can work from the same information.

It also helps the team manage multiple requests at the same time, balance different requirements and work through potential staffing scenarios rather than relying so heavily on information held by individual team members.

“It reduces the effort, it makes it more reliable and increases also the quality in the staffing.”

Supporting the Organisation as It Grows

The clearest benefit identified by the consultancy is scale. Retain provides a more comprehensive data model than the organisation previously had, bringing useful information such as previous projects and potential staffing conflicts into the staffing process.

This gives the consultancy a stronger foundation for managing more projects, consultants and managers within the staffing system than was practical with its previous SharePoint solution.

This matters because staffing is a business-critical process. If the staffing process cannot operate effectively, it can affect the consultancy’s ability to pitch for new work, take on new projects and address staffing issues within existing projects. These decisions are often time-sensitive.

Retain has not fundamentally changed how quickly an individual staffing decision is made. The previous process did not necessarily take longer. The difference is that the old approach depended much more heavily on information held in the heads of members of the staffing team, something that became increasingly difficult as the organisation grew.

More Connected Information and Reporting

The consultancy also uses Retain’s reporting capabilities regularly to support its staffing and recruitment pipeline. Reports are reviewed in management and partner meetings to provide visibility of current resource utilisation and availability.

Forecasting itself is not a new capability introduced by Retain. The consultancy already produced forecasts through its previous SharePoint and Excel setup. Instead, reporting is now more automated and sits within a system capable of supporting the organisation at a greater scale.
The team is also working on reporting that links staffing information with project billing, creating additional options that were not available through the previous setup.

The team combines Retain’s forecasting data with its own knowledge and context, particularly when planning further into the future. Near-term forecasts are generally more reliable, while longer-term planning benefits from the staffing team’s knowledge of project developments that may not yet have been entered into the system.

The Impact

For this consultancy, the value of Retain is best understood through the staffing process itself rather than through utilisation. At implementation, demand for consultants was already exceeding available resources, so the impact is more accurately reflected in the quality, reliability and scalability of how staffing is managed.
That gives the staffing team a more structured way to manage a business-critical process as the organisation continues to grow.

Retain provides the consultancy with a more powerful system and broader reporting options. With that additional capability comes ongoing maintenance and support from the consultancy’s IT team, while the staffing workflow itself helps reduce effort within the staffing process.

Continuing the Adoption Journey

The consultancy continues to develop how it uses Retain, with increasing engagement among project managers representing an important next step.
Retain gives project managers the ability to view available resources and identify preferred consultants. Increasing engagement with these features offers an opportunity to bring more staffing communication and information into the system.

Increasing project manager adoption is therefore an important next step. Greater direct use of the system could make the process easier for the staffing team to manage and help capture more staffing information within Retain.
For the consultancy, the journey is about moving beyond a SharePoint and Excel-based approach and establishing a stronger foundation for a larger, more complex and business-critical staffing operation. As adoption continues to develop, the opportunity is to bring more of the information and collaboration around staffing into Retain.

Customer Perspective

“The biggest gain is scale. We can handle more projects, more consultants and more managers in the system than we could have in the SharePoint solution. Staffing is one of our business-critical processes, so the process needs to run.” – Partner, Management Consultancy