Outside of project margins, utilization of human capital is the largest lever for impacting professional services organizations. The math is simple, for a 100 person services organization, 5 points of utilization equates to approximately $1 million to the bottom line. Services organizations that don’t consistently achieve target utilization levels are usually plagued with a lack of disciplined practices, poor tools and infrastructure, under-investment or some combination of all three.
We believe utilization is critical in periods of growth as well as contraction. In our experience, poor utilization is not as simple as having too many resources for too little work. Through the effective management of your resources, you can achieve significant improvements in profitability, employee retention, and career development. It is about getting the right person in the right place at the right time.
We recently worked with a professional services organization that wanted to improve its resource forecasting to ensure more definitive planning, better execute capacity planning at various levels and roles to support aligning supply and demand, and support organizational growth with better visibility and transparency in their data to measure and track business patterns. The organization needed to better understand how to design and deploy a centralized resource management office (RMO). By leveraging our resource management expertise, the organization made tremendous progress with data cleanup and standardizing processes around staffing resources.
- With greater visibility, forecasting resource needs has improved and they can provide timely and effective management reporting to help drive strategic organizational decisions
- More predictable and balanced utilization across the resource pool has driven lower resource cost for service delivery
- Timely project start-times and the ability to back-fill positions in less time has led to new high levels of customer satisfaction
Click here to read more about the challenges this organization faced, along with the performance improvements they were able to achieve.