Workload planning software, yes, but for whom? Part 2: Management teams
Agathe Placet
Content manager
April 26, 2023
4 min
If the operational success of a project is played out in the field, its strategic and financial success is decided above all behind the scenes, within the various departments of the consulting firm or ofIT services companies.
And this success is based on 3 terms: anticipation, information, decision... in other words, the mission of workload planning software.
The first article in this mini-series of content dedicated to users of the workload planning tool demonstrated the value of this tool for what we call the operational players.
From the transmission and reception of information to consultants in the field to simplified resource management by managers at assignment and optimized project monitoring by managers, workload planning software has become essential to the smooth operational progress of projects.
However, since the success of a project is judged as much by the quality of its operational execution as by its profitability, it is only logical that the master project management tool should not be reserved for operational users only.
On the contrary, it must be accessible to every link in your company, and in particular to the management teams, who are the guarantors of this profitability.
Discover, through this second article, the place of the assignment tool within the human resources and financial management teams, as well as within top management.
85% of the jobs of 2030 would not yet exist (Source: La tribune).
If this means an imperative need for employees, especially consultants, to continuously train in order to stay in the market, it also means a real need for human resources departments toanticipate the skills needs of clients.
There is, of course, a need to anticipate future needs, as part of a forward-looking HR approach, but also, and above all, a need to anticipate skills requirements. skills in the short and medium term, making it essential for human resources departments to useworkload planning software.
Thanks to a real-time visualization of the skills and experience available within the teams of consultants, as well as those that are lacking, the tool of assignment allows human resources toorient their recruitment strategies, as well as the training plans of their employees.
Objective: to fill these gaps of competences allowing on the one hand to reach the level of quality of operational execution sought and, on the other hand, towiden the field of the projects to which the consulting firm or theIT services companies can answer.
By centralizing all employee data (experience and skills, certifications, availability, but also interest in this or that type of project) but also the project's reality on the ground as well as the outlines of customer requests, the workload planning software considerably increases the chances of informed decision-making by human resources departments.
Getting projects is good. Making them profitable is better. It is even essential to the survival of any consulting firm or IT services companies and it is the financial department that is in charge of it.
How can you ensure that each project is profitable when the number of projects is increasing and their complexity is growing? This is the problem that the workload planning tool solves by providing the teams responsible for financial management with everything they need to manage the company's profitability.
This starts with access to centralized data available in real time, starting with the evolution of revenues and costs at the global level and by project.
And how can we talk about cost management without talking about the ability of the finance department to properly allocate resources and thus ultimately reduce the rate of intercontracting as much as possible. These are all issues that a software program from assignment enables finance teams to master.
The managers of the consulting firm or ofIT services companies are entrusted with the difficult mission of having a concrete knowledge of the progress of the main ongoing customer projects while keeping this capacity of abstraction necessary to determine the strategic axes to adopt to make the company grow.
This double challenge makes certain functionalities of the assignment tool more valuable, such as
... in other words, functionalities that allow you to grasp at a glance where the company is at the operational and financial level and the decisions to be made at a given moment.
The assignment being the heart of the reactor of the consulting firms and IT services companies, each stratum of management, from human resources to the top management through the financial management, testifies of the same needs.
It is a matter of being able to access information quickly in order to make the most informed decisions possible, or even to anticipate future difficulties.
This makes the use of a workload planning software crucial to the proper management of the company with the focus on maximizing the occupancy rates and therefore the profitability of each project.
Would you like to find out more? We've got plenty of resources to help you go further.
To complement this topic, read our template "The perfect load plan for successful deployment".
See also our white papers, guides and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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