Charging plan software, yes but for whom? Part 1: operational users
Agathe Placet
Content manager
April 18, 2023
7 min
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Your consulting firm or your ESN does it have more than thirty employees?
So you probably already realized that manage your load plan without load plan software (or Staffing tool) is at best a hazardous task, even dangerous for your business.
At Napta, we speak with knowledge. Indeed, a number of our customers worked like this before using our Staffing software, making do with an ersatz such asExcel to supervise and organize their client projects.
And if the absence of centralization of data is often singled out as one of the main disadvantages of using Excel to manage your load plan, very limited collaborative features of such a tool are systematically identified by managers, management teams and, of course, by the consultants themselves.
Entre la budget management, of allotted time or even skill needs, project planning via a workload plan is an intrinsically collaborative activity. So there is nothing more normal that the tool that makes this planning more fluid is also normal.
And no effective collaboration without precise definition of stakeholders and their roles and responsibilities in the project and therefore in the use of the load plan software.
Napta believes that for load planning software to be truly useful to your consulting firm or IT service provider, it must be made accessible to all hierarchical levels of the company.
Discover, through the first part of this series of 2 articles dedicated to load plan software users, the different types of users to whom to make your load plan tool accessible for the most effective monitoring and management of the project possible.
At the forefront of any client project, your consultants are the users closest to the concrete execution of the mission.
They must therefore be able to go back to both the time spent working on the client mission, everything malfunctioning or unscheduled occurring on the ground, just like their Feedback.
Information should not only be bottom-up, from the consultant to the manager and the other project stakeholders, but also top-down in order to offer the collaborator visibility, for example on the next steps of the mission or on any strategic change decided between his hierarchy and the client.
And that's what the load plan software for the consultant. The tool should allow him to note the time spent on each mission, to transmit and receive all important information via a notification system, but also to share his field experience so that the next mission takes place even better.
At the time when The turnover within consulting firms is close to 2 times higher compared to that in other sectors (33% vs 15%), this last element is far from being anecdotal.
So that consultants don't think about anything other than the proper execution of their missions, managers take over much of the rest, starting with monitoring the smooth progress of the project.
And that's where your load plan tool comes in!
Intended to allow managers to maintain control of the progress of the project in the field, the Staffing software should allow them to follow several elements at a glance:
But this follow-up only makes sense if it allows managers to Easily communicate the right information to the right people involved in the project. It is also the role of load plan software to facilitate this feedback or this descent of information to the project teams.
Since they are responsible for the heavy task of reconciling customer needs and the wishes, skills and, above all, availability of consultants, Business unit managers in ESN and Staffing managers in consulting firms must handle a multitude of parameters.
From TACE (Activity Rate Excluded Leave, also called Staffing Rate) and TACI (Activity Rate, Leave Included) of each consultant to resource wishes formulated by managers through last-minute staffing requests, Business unit managers or staffing managers work with constantly evolving data.
The staffing tool made available to them must therefore allow them
La multiplicity of factors to manage for a mission to be a success, as is the fact that these Factors can change rapidly depending on the progress of the mission or even the need to transmit all relevant information in real time make the use of workload planning software simply essential at each level of the project.
Consultants should be able to Report any important information related to the project. Managers, for their part, must ensure the proper execution of missions by monitoring the progress of projects in real time. Finally, Business Unit and Staffing Managers use theStaffing tool to building successful teams taking into account the skills and availability of consultants.
These users, who could be described Of operatives, however, are not the only ones to use load plan software to ensure the success of projects.
Find out in the next article in this series dedicated to users of staffing tools, a second category of users, those working within the management and top management teams.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our template “The perfect load plan for a successful deployment”.
Also discover our guides, white papers, and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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