In 2021, after taking over from a departing VP and being promoted to Director, Operations at a leading tech consulting company, I moved quickly to streamline the way we staffed our client projects by:
- Improving processes, including condensing multiple, separate meetings into leading one major weekly 20+ person staffing meeting, which ensured all the relevant stakeholders were always in the same room so that we could make decisions faster.
- Improving communication to ensure everyone was on the same page and no one ever felt surprised by a) who was rolling off a project, b) who was rolling on, c) what staffing requests were currently active, d) how and why staffing decisions were made on projects.
- Providing more visibility into our bench, and providing our talent team with more accurate data about potential upcoming billable hiring needs based on potential work arriving from the sales pipeline.
- Introducing new tooling, including working together with a colleague to roll out the implementation of a skills management platform. This allowed us to automate the collection of self-reported skill ratings from our technology and design staff every quarter. This platform gave us multiple benefits: it gave billable staff an easy way to see their own skill progress over months and years, it improved decision-makers’ ability to match the right projects to the right skills and interests, and ultimately improved our ability to put together the right teams for our clients.