January 3, 2025
Bandwidth Management for Consultants
Managing the bench is among the hardest parts of running an agency. Here's how professional services firms right-size their staffs to match bandwidth.
Managing the bench is among the hardest parts of running an agency. Here's how professional services firms right-size their staffs to match bandwidth.
An anonymous project manager sighs heavily when we ask her how she staffs up new engagements. It involves numerous spreadsheets to track clients and personnel, each of which has to be manually updated and color coded to show things link skill sets and bandwidth. Unfortunately, the spreadsheets aren’t even the stressful part.
Once she’s taken the time to bring the spreadsheets up to date, it’s time for the big meeting. Anywhere from four to seven people, including the firm’s partners, gather around the spreadsheets and take a look together. They’re ready to play Human Tetris, which often lasts for hours.
The game of Human Tetris plays out like this: First, the group has to assess the needs of an incoming projects. Most importantly, they need to determine which skill sets and seniority levels are required to assemble a team for their client.
Once they know the needs, they take a look at the bench. There’s an assessment of who’s available, and who could be made available by shifting things around on other projects.
For example, if a project requires LinkedIn ad expertise, the agency assesses bandwidth among those with social media skills. If none of those employees are free, it’s time to see if one can be pulled off another project and replaced by someone with a skillset that might work for the other engagement, but not the incoming one.
If there’s still a coverage gap, it needs to be filled quickly. This could mean turning to freelancers in the short term, or it might require the hiring of a new full-time employee.
Our anonymous source tells us these meetings normally last over an hour at her agency. If the group can’t reach a consensus within that hour – and they often can’t – it could mean a snap decision by the partners, or calling everyone back for a bonus meeting another time.
Managing bandwidth requires “ruthless prioritization,” says Samual Huang, CEO of Tele Ads Agency:
“We track bandwidth by analyzing weekly capacity across projects using a simple ratio: billable hours divided by team availability. If utilization exceeds 80%, we know we’re close to the danger zone of burnout. This forces us to prioritize clients offering high ROI over low-margin engagements.”
Compared to the story our anonymous project manager tells, Huang is able to make decisions quickly by thinking of it as ongoing triage. No matter the process or the size of the group, though, almost everyone we talked to described a great need for communication when building a team for a new project, normally at the same time as juggling numerous software solutions.
“We utilise a combination of project management software and internal communication tools to streamline our staffing process. Tools like Asana and Trello allow us to visualise ongoing projects and team workloads, while Slack facilitates real-time communication. This dual approach ensures that we can quickly adapt to any changes in project scope or team availability, allowing us to allocate resources effectively and maintain project momentum,” says Balázs Keszthelyi, Founder and CEO of TechnoLynx.
Huang says his team uses Slack to discuss bandwidth real-time, then tracks deadlines in Notion, but sometimes finds that it’s easiest to put the tech aside and break out a whiteboard for simplicity’s sake.
Deepak Shukla, CEO of Pearl Lemon Web, relies on numerous software products to keep an eye on bandwidth. The team at Pearl Lemon Web uses Asana to centralize project workflows, Harvest for resource allocation, and Slack for communication. They also rely on Monday and Toggl Track to keep an eye on timesheets and workload. At the end of the day, though, he reinforces the idea that there will always be a manual component to bandwidth management:
“We gauge bandwidth by combining data from project management tools with regular team check-ins. This ensures a balance between workload and capacity. Tools like Monday.com and Toggl Track provide real-time utilisation metrics, allowing us to proactively identify when the team is approaching their limits. But numbers aren’t the whole story. Our team leads frequently check in to capture the human aspect, ensuring no one feels overwhelmed.”
Shukla nails the need for the human touch. Sometimes your employees might be dealing with things outside of work that can impact their bandwidth. Other times a project’s success or failure can come down to finding the right personality fit between the client and one of your consultants. The trick is to put the right information in front of the human making the decisions about bandwidth management so the process can be as easy as possible.
TimeFront holds all of your employees, clients, and projects in one place. You can visualize everyone’s utilization and see how they’re spread across projects. This way, you can staff up a new engagement with the right team and maintain a balanced workforce. Try it for free today.
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