Business Management – David Bailey

11 May 202011 May 2020

Update your consulting propositions now!

Consulting firms and their clients have now broadly adapted to the remote working world. Projects have been prioritised – some put on ice at one end, new urgent projects added at the other and a mix in-between.

Client thoughts are turning to the future, now that it’s clear that we won’t be “coming out of this” any time soon. When we do emerge, we’ll be doing it into a new world…but what will it look like?

Strategy consulting firms have seen backlog and pipeline drops by around one third over the past couple of months. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise – who has wanted to strategise over the past few weeks? I believe that these firms are about to come into a new wave of activity, however, scenario planning for their clients, working out what they’ll need to do to adapt to the new world. They’re getting ready for this and the volume of post-COVID-19 “insights” on the major strategy consulting firms’ websites has been steadily increasing over the past week or so – much of this is at an overall “preparing for the new normal” level but some is quite focused on individual sectors or the potential use of specific solutions such as AI. Interesting reading!

Every sector will have its own scenarios to consider – to mention just a few examples, will Utilities think about onshoring their call centres, how can airports utilise contact-free technologies to transform customer journeys whilst maintaining high levels of security, which manufacturing supply chains still operate effectively and which need to go back to the drawing board, will retail banks take the opportunity to radically downsize their branch networks, how much can the health sector provide via home-based care with the support of virtual patient engagement technologies? There will be a huge amount to do and a lot of advice and support to be provided by the consulting and IT industries in particular.

Don’t relax at this point, however. It’s not the case that all firms will benefit equally. You need to prepare, and do it now!

I was reviewing a consulting firm’s Financial Services Digital proposition recently. It was fine…good, even…but I realised that it was deficient in that it looked at the world through a “pre-COVID” lens. Financial Services has, to date, viewed Digital as primarily another channel. Now that, for example, the over 60’s are using PCs and tablets for video calls and are having to use the internet for shopping, banking etc, there’s an argument that the “cork is out of the bottle”. Digital Transformation is about to hit Financial Services organisations like a tsunami! Digital will be expected by the majority of the retail and business customer bases and there will be a permanent switch in traffic volumes between channels. The impact on operating models, staff skillsets, data accessibility and the like is significant.

Taking this on board (admittedly just a scenario!), the consulting firm’s Financial Services Digital proposition suddenly needs a rethink – it should be more “all-encompassing”, at least in terms of providing the framework, and then the client can understand the scope of the overall transformation required and the elements that this consulting firm can help to address.

The same holds true for many consulting propositions – they need to be reviewed and then updated to take the new world into account. Oh, and just to add an additional flavour, I suggest there are two new world time horizons to think about – “medium term” whilst social distancing remains essential (probably until there’s a vaccine that many of us have been able to benefit from) and “longer term” when we’re properly in the new world.

Enjoy the rethink and stay safe.

26 October 2017

Are you managing your bench?

Is your bench empty? Unlikely, but would you want it to be anyway? Do you know how populated it is?

When I spend time with services firms, conversation inevitably gets round to profitability and then I start asking about gross margin. Two times out of three, I find that gross margin isn’t understood well and, in particular, the costs of employed delivery resources are not split between chargeable and non-chargeable time. When investigated, the cost of non-chargeable time is often an eye-watering surprise for the firm’s leadership team! Worse, how this non-chargeable time is being spent isn’t understood properly.

We’re running people businesses. If we don’t understand how our people are spending their time then we’re in “cobbler’s children” territory!

When we prepare a budget, we set utilisation levels for each grade of consultant from Partner down to Analyst (Note: how “utilisation” is calculated varies from one firm’s definition to another and is a topic of great debate!). On an ongoing basis, we then need to manage our resources so that the budgeted utilisation level is achieved or even exceeded slightly from time to time….but do we do this?

Step one, therefore, is about assigning our “home team” onto chargeable client work to target utilisation levels. If we’re struggling to do this then we don’t have a high enough level of business overall and so are overstaffed, the work we’re selling isn’t matching with the intended skills mix that we’ve resourced up for, resourcing isn’t controlled tightly enough and delivery is biased too heavily in the direction of associates, or we don’t have sufficient confidence in individual consultants. Whatever the reason, it needs to be identified and addressed.

Step two is to make use of the non-chargeable time. When we do the budgeting exercise, we rarely do anything other than identify the headcount requirement to deliver the volume and types of work that we’re planning to sell and calculate a budgeted cost of employed consultants and external third parties (associates, partner firms etc) associated with this. In addition, we should look at the amount of non-chargeable time that we’ve built our budget around and the skills linked to this and build a plan to use this effectively for the good of both the firm and the consultants.

Topics such as training requirements mostly get picked up via personal development plans – the timing of delivery of training is planned in to fit with periods of expected lower chargeability where possible and I rarely see big issues in this area. I often see Business Development and Proposition Development-related activities, however, being left loose and then suddenly jumped on as useful things to be doing “immediately” whenever the leadership team realises that the bench is looking a bit big and people need to be given something to do. Why?

Most firms these days have resourcing, or wider Professional Services Automation systems, installed and they insert forward client project resourcing needs into them. This is great, and facilitates forward revenue and gross margin projections, especially if weighted “hot Prospects” are shown as well. Many of these systems also allow for different categories of “project” to be entered as well and we can use these to schedule a predicted workload of different non-chargeable activities, even split into types such as Market Research, Marketing, Account Management and Proposition Development. Resourcing discussions can then include debates around the importance of the individual non-chargeable activities as well as client assignments – I accept that the non-chargeable activities will regularly be the ones to “give” in order to satisfy client demand but at least we will know what we’re moving around and we’ll understand the impact on the “list of useful things to do”.

If we plan and manage the use of our resources properly for both chargeable and non-chargeable activity, we’ll achieve higher consultant utilisation, increased opportunities for additional sales, a more likely achievement of internal development plans and more satisfied employees who know that they’re always doing something useful.

23 March 2017

Lifting the timesheet curse!

Most services businesses, from law firms through consultancies to outsourcers, rely on people entering time into timesheets. At the most basic level, timesheets provide some form of audit trail that work has been done and, not least in Time & Materials projects, they provide data to support a fortnightly or monthly bill to the client. Most firms have now moved beyond paper or spreadsheet-based timesheets and have either built or bought a simple timesheet system. So far so good.

Unfortunately, complexity and human nature then enter the fray! Consultants and associates dial into the timesheet system at the end of the week (if you’re lucky!) and input a mixture of reality, the way they remember things and/or the answer that the project manager tells them to enter – filling in the timesheet is a mechanical exercise, a chore! Project managers use a timesheet approval process to manipulate reality to reflect the time estimates given in the project plan. Also, there may or may not be a company policy in place about the “professional day” and how timesheet data is used to create client invoices – for example, if the (very!) simple figure below showed an individual’s timesheet for a single week, how many days would you charge the client for Project A?

Hours worked	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
Project A	8	10	6	11	2	0	2
Business Development	0	0	3	0	2	0	0
Internal/Other	1	0	1	0	5	0	1

Depending on firm policies and client contracts in place, any one of the following (and more!) could well be correct:

– 5 days

– 4.875 days

– 5.2 days

– 4 days.

In passing, we used to have a timesheet code for “Internal/Other” – it took some time before we realised that it was being used as a bucket to enter time into when it wouldn’t fit anywhere else!

What we need is an internal culture whereby people enter their actual hours worked honestly into a timesheet system that is easy to use and clever enough to apply different sets of rules by project depending on company policy and client agreements (e.g. “a day’s a day” or “”a day is a period of eight hours with part days charged pro rata”)…..but that’s just the billing bit!

If the system can also compare actual time entered with what was expected when an assignment was set up, it can then report out variances to client Partners, project managers etc. to allow them to address project issues, identify potential training needs and learn about over/under estimates applied during the sales process. I’d like it to go further, however, and hold data about resource costs too so that we can understand, without resorting to endless spreadsheet analysis, real gross margin figures and compare them with plan, and highlight the right assignments to be discussed at Partner level…..now it becomes a more powerful and useful business management tool!

When used properly, timesheets contain a wealth of information that can be used to help the Partner team to optimise their business and keep their consultants fresh and ready for the next challenge.