Effective Resource Management to Balance Supply with Customer Demand During Tough Times

The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying societal and economic changes have many professional services organizations scrambling to manage their resource allocations effectively against client needs.

Many professional services organizations are finding their teams are spending more time on the bench. To keep a PSO running and your valuable team members employed and engaged requires a shift in thinking, strategy, and visibility.

There are three key areas that can bridge the gap between your pre-crisis business plans and your ability to manage resource and client demand with your teams and their availability and skills. Using this time to optimize your resource management, adjust your sales strategy, and maximize your visibility with reporting, you’ll maintain a level of work and revenue that will see you through times of crisis.

Optimize your Resource Management

With the current shifting economic environment, professional services organizations need to enable their ability to be nimble and agile while also retaining their top talent. That requires knowledge about your teams as well as systems and processes that promote responsiveness.

Part of a successful engagement is getting the right team members in the right seats on the bus. To do that, leaders need to rapidly understand their resources’ skills, strengths, experience, and even interests and preferences. Take time to create and update a skills matrix or resource dashboard so that the information you need to meet a client’s demands is at your fingertips.

Successful engagements also require having teams available to add to a project when they are needed. That requires accurate project forecasting. In these uncertain times, forecasting should be frequent, even daily, or hourly events as projects are shifted, canceled and rescoped. This forecasting feeds into your utilization rates and revenue and signals smooth sailing or rough waters with enough time to make necessary adjustments.

Ways to Adjust Your Sales Strategy

Tough times call for a new perspective on sales. You’ll need to get a handle on what customers are going to do and how you can help them with your services.

There are a number of ways you can adjust your sales to keep your resources busy and carve out work, even when new customers aren’t as prevalent as before. Here we’ve outlined a few and discuss even more in our webinar.

What can we sell differently?

What you sold yesterday – and how you sold it – may not work in an uncertain economic environment. Clients may pull back on projects or be re-allocating funds because of their own revenue challenges.

By taking a close look at your services and rethinking their structure, need, and delivery, you can open doors that might otherwise be closed during difficult times. For instance, can you break down your services into smaller, bite-sized engagements? Are there ways to enable your clients to kick off projects before beginning the engagement with your firm? Your goal in retooling and remarketing your offerings is to keep your teams working, even if they are involved in smaller projects. This also makes it easier to be agile and to swap in a resource to fill a gap on short notice.

Can you adjust your pricing?

Your focus during times of crises such as we are in with COVID19 should be on utilization and less so on higher profit margins. When you review your current pricing, try and identify ways to make adjustments to allow customers to say yes while also keeping the business afloat. It’s more important to keep your team working now than to build up significant cash stores.

Your pricing strategy should look at opportunities to make short term price adjustments or even offer limited discounts for existing customers. The key is to keep the work flowing and to enable enough cash flow to support your business.

Revisit your pipeline often

It’s crucial to be in a position to pivot when an opportunity arises, or the environment changes. Just like with resource management, you’ll want to look at your pipeline frequently. Keep it updated and keep it realistic. Overestimating potential sales could be detrimental to your ability to run your business while underestimating could leave you short of the right talent to complete the project.

Maximize Visibility with Reporting

Effective businesses thrive on reporting. But in the current climate, you no longer have the opportunity to walk down the hall to make a data request or to wait days for a report to be completed. You need data to be able to make informed decisions, and that data must be current and on-demand.

There are three essential reports that should be near real-time to help you with decision making.

Project portfolio status: As a leader, you don’t have the time to deep dive into every project. Instead, you need a high-level view of the health of current projects so you can spend your time where it’s needed. A dashboard of all current project statuses makes it easy to see where you need to get involved or can simply trust your team to get the work done.

Resource forecast: Your resource forecast will let you shift team members to projects as needed and understand, at a glance, where you have utilization challenges. This is information that can even be fed back up to sales. If you know you’ll have a lot of one skill set on the bench soon, sales can focus on finding the next engagement for those resources.

Cash flow report: Your cash flow report is important in the best of times. During uncertain times, its importance multiplies. While you may not be focused on increasing revenues, you do need to understand what your inflows and outflows are so you can do what you can to have enough to keep the business functioning.

To be an effective business in times like these, professional services organizations need increased visibility and a Professional Services Automation system like NetSuite OpenAir PSA that enables agility. A PSA tool can help you make informed decisions that keep the company’s valuable team members engaged, working, and challenged in their client projects. With creativity and a commitment to clients and your teams, your organization will prosper through difficult and unpredictable economic times. To hear more strategies for maintaining your professional services organization during rough times, check out our webinar, Marrying Supply with Demand in an Unpredictable Environment within Services Organizations