Best Practices in Resource Management for Your Consultancy

Tweet it:'Randy Mysliviec, Managing Director of Resource Management Institute, talks about best practices in resource management for consulting firms'

By Guest Author Randy Mysliviec, Managing Director of Resource Management Institute

A recent PWC study of over 10,640 projects found that only 2.5% of companies complete their projects 100% successfully. To achieve project excellence, a sound resource management discipline is needed to effectively control and reduce the ‘project killers’ including: project visibility barriers, scope creep, and lack of good information to effectively deploy talent. In my experience as Managing Director of Resource Management Institute (RMI), there are some resource management best practices you can use to overcome these project killers.

Reducing Project Visibility Barriers

Experienced consultants know that successful project delivery does not just happen because you have won the business. Consulting firms can only make good decisions when the information they need is accurate and actionable and provides project-level detail. That is why visibility into potential project barriers is essential to overall project success. In Deltek’s How Consulting Firms Win Playbook, they list out three common visibility problems that a firm might face:

1. Lagging information that is out-of-date by the time you receive it
2. Having a siloed view of company-level information that may or may not be accurate
3. Obtaining information that is difficult to act on quickly or requires expert interpretation

Keeping these common problems in mind, Resource Management Institute (RMI) has developed three best practices to consider to combat visibility barriers with resource management:

1. Have a long-range view of your skills mix and capacity needs at least 4-6 months into the future
2. Maintain a continuously updated capacity plan
3. Create a (continuous) gap analysis to drive your efforts to rebalance skills and capacity to meet future needs

Lack of Good Information for Effectively Deploying Talent

The most common reason for project failures is the inability to get the right person in the right place at the right time. That’s where technology can help. The right Resource Management tool can help you effectively deploy talent faster and more effectively. Deloitte, a leading consulting firm, explains that talent mobility and marketplace technology can serve a critical role in scaling talent alignment objectives. Using technology, firms can surface opportunities and match it to talent availability across the organization. Through the use of intelligent matching software, talent and work opportunities can be automated to better align talent to your business needs. This ultimately broadens a firm’s available talent resources without additional effort to create a more transparent, data-driven approach to talent deployment.

In addition to the benefits of technology, there are three resource management best practices that RMI has found that can assist consulting firms with addressing the need for better information to support deploying talent effectively:

1. Maintain a useful skills database with information including resource skills, competencies, employee developmental wants and needs, and availability
2. Build a corresponding and comprehensive sourcing approach which includes resources sourced via the gig marketplace
3. Combine a staffing methodology (vs. continuous triage) with technology to drive project staffing that balances the economic needs of the business with employee wants and desires

Interested in learning more about how to utilize resource management to optimize project delivery? Watch the webinar, where I will go deeper into these areas and reveal how consulting firms can overcome project management killers to improve company performance.

Read Next: 5 Characteristics of Highly Profitable Consulting Firms