Staffing: what cost for what ROI?
Agathe Placet
Content manager
September 19, 2023
4 min
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For anyone who works or has worked in consulting, the need to set up a Process of Staffing and resource management is simply a matter of course.
At the same time as the few missions at the beginning give way to longer and complex customer projects, Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheets, overloaded with formulas, admit defeat and disappear in favor of real ones. tools created tailor-made to manage daily staffing in consulting firms and ESNs.
You are then equipped with a real ally in a position to manage these thousand and one essential things for identify, prioritize, arbitrate, allocate your various resources (time of your consultants, specific technical skills, tool licenses, operating budget,...).
But none of that happens magically. Beyond words and best practices, operationally set up a The staffing process in your team necessarily comes at a cost.
So your bet is to Focus on measurable ROI which results from it. Objective: convince your teams that this cost is required to benefit from much greater results and create positive resource management momentum.
So, in this article, let's review the ROI resulting from the implementation of your Process of Staffing as well as associated cost items.
In reality, the ROI of staffing can be felt even before you perceive any measurable and quantified effect on your consulting firm.
The simple fact of launching yourself into the implementation of a Process and specific tools intended to frame what constitutes the epicenter of your activity, i.e. staffing, sends a positive message to your customers, your partners and, of course, to your employees.
This broadcasts the signals of an even more advanced professionalization of your services and the functioning of your practice or your ESN and therefore the ambition to save time and achieve widespread efficiency.
But in a more factual way, if we have to remember the two types of ROI reported by Napta customers when we talk about Staffing that would be the effect of the latter on your Activity Rate Excluded Leave (TACE) as well as on your turnover.
The TACE corresponds to the number of days that your employee assigns to billable benefits out of the number of days available to him or her once the vacation days have been removed.
Plus your Process of Staffing is well-established, the more likely your TACE is to improve due to more billable days.
Why? Because your employee will spend their time doing what they know how to do, namely use your technical expertise to solve your customer's problem and not for fill in boxes on an Excel file designed to manage your resources internally.
And it is this same intelligent use of your employees' time thanks to staffing that has a positive effect on turnover of your business. Each stage of the mission life cycle is accelerated, the submission of your commercial proposal to your prospect following a request for resources (Lead Time to Staffing) to the feedback following the mission (which you will also find under the term of REX).
It's not about that Just a few examples of ROI, which also extends to the management of your employees with generally a improvement of turnover within your practice. But even though these ROI elements are indisputable, they require investments from your firm to become a reality.
In the opinion of all our customers, there is clearly a before and after when talking about the establishment of a Process of Staffing in their consulting firms.
This work is profoundly transforming the way teams work together and the way the firm operates in general. And that transformation is a cost in itself. It presents a opportunity cost.
Investing in your Staffing will certainly be a lifesaver for your business, but it also means not making another investment. And that's why, when making your investment choices, it is crucial for you to understand the predictable return on investment of Staffing.
Another cost that should not be overlooked is the investment required to transition your process and tool teams, which are certainly unsuited to resource management but still under control, to a device created tailor-made to succeed in the complex task of staffing but still unknown most often by your consultants and other employees.
In addition to this human cost and the associated adaptation time, there is The cost of the staffing tool itself. On this point, the amount of investment required will depend on whether you opt for the creation of tailor-made software for your business or if you prefer otherwise, save time by turning to a complete and pre-existing staffing tool.
The reality on the ground ends up teaching any consulting firm and IT services company that it is very difficult to grow or even simply to carry out client missions effectively without professional and precise organization and monitoring of resources.
And for that, the investment in one Process and a tool dedicated to staffing is essential, especially as the impact on two of the most important indicators of any consulting activity, namely TACE and turnover, is significant.
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