How to find the perfect people for every project – to maximize client satisfaction and project success.
In the consulting world, finding the right consultants for each project is essential. It ensures your firm delivers the exceptional results clients demand and maintains its competitive edge.
Successfully staffing consultants on projects ensures that projects are completed on time, on budget, and to the highest quality standards – boosting both client satisfaction and your company reputation.
But how do you staff consultants on projects? What factors do you need to consider? And where do you find the resource data you need?
You’ll discover everything you need to know below - including what makes a consultant perfect for a project, and a step-by-step guide to staffing projects.
As a consulting firm, your reputation and repeat custom depend on delivering exceptional client outcomes. And you can only do that when you match the right consultants to the project’s needs.
That means everything from the skills and expertise they need to execute a project successfully, to the time and motivation to do their best work.
Accurate staffing decisions reduce waste and inefficiencies, improve productivity and profitability, and ensure your projects run on time and on budget.
Get it right and you’ll have high-performing projects that deliver success for clients and your firm. But get it wrong and you’ll rapidly lose standing in the sector.
Research finds 87% of consulting clients say that trust is more important than ever when it comes to commissioning services. Staffing projects appropriately is your first step towards delivering on your promises.
Plus, strategic staffing isn’t just about client satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is key too.
Aligning your staffing with employee preferences unlocks engagement, satisfaction and motivation. And matching people with projects that further their professional ambitions creates loyalty and reduces turnover. A strong employer brand also helps attract and retain new talent, one of the major challenges in the consulting sector.
Strategic staffing of projects involves balancing a combination of different factors. It isn’t simply about allocating the most appropriately skilled consultant with availability – though that is part of it.
To elevate your project staffing practices – and achieve better outcomes for clients – there’s a lot more in the mix. Here are the six things you need to consider when allocating consultants to projects.
Availability is the first and most obvious element. Who’s available to take on the work? There’s no point assigning work to someone who isn’t available at the right time, as that will just delay your schedule and disrupt the whole project.
Capacity is often confused with availability, but they’re subtly different.
The general rule is to aim for an 85% utilization rate. That means 85% of consultants’ time is allocated to scheduled work and the last 15% is there to absorb unexpected tasks.
It’s about project risk management. If you schedule consultants beyond their capacity – say 100% utilization – and they’re at risk of burnout. But if you schedule under capacity, it leads to increased bench time, lower efficiency, and lower profitability.
Unless your client is an eccentric oligarch or unlimited-budget billionaire, cost will always be key. You need to balance expertise with budget constraints, hitting the sweet spot between the best-qualified consultants and cost-efficiency.
Assigning the most senior consultants may not always justify the cost. Assigning junior consultants may save money – and present a great internal upskilling opportunity – but may require a longer schedule to accommodate their learning curve.
Cost and expertise are interlinked. More senior and experienced consultants will take a bigger bite from your budget. But you shouldn’t cut costs when it could impact quality. Poor project outcomes have far-reaching consequences for repeat custom and reputation.
You need to identify the skills required for each project – and the level required – and match those to your available resources.
By matching consultants with the right skill set to the project, you ensure the project is delivered to the desired standard, without incurring unnecessary additional costs.
Employee preferences are often omitted from staffing decisions. But it makes sense to match people to projects that interest them. Think about your own work. How much more motivated and productive are you when you’re doing something you’re passionate about?
Considering consultant preferences as part of your project staffing decisions will unlock intrinsic motivation and engagement, which can lead to higher productivity and staff satisfaction.
The final factor is consultants’ career ambitions. As with employee preferences, incorporating career planning into staffing decisions improves engagement and retention.
Consultants are happy knowing you’re providing stepping stones towards their professional goals. And you have a route to upskill staff members – and plan for succession – through stretch assignments.
This approach not only benefits the consultants but also strengthens the firm’s overall talent pool.
Ok. Now you know what to look for when staffing consultants, how do you actually find the information you need? If you have a resource management platform you should be able to access this resource data easily through reporting dashboards and data visualization – as well as quickly build project schedules.
The first step is to understand the project and exactly what it’s going to entail. This will determine the tasks, timings, and skills required. Speak to project stakeholders to define the project scope, objectives, and deliverables, so you can determine the appropriate staffing.
Equipped with your understanding of project requirements, you can begin defining the expertise required. This involves identifying the skills, experience level, and any specialized knowledge required to achieve project goals. Clearly defining these requirements helps in matching the right consultants to the project.
A skills matrix is a visualization of consultants’ skills and proficiency levels. It will help you quickly identify the most suitable consultants for each project task. Here’s an example of what a skills matrix looks like in Runn.
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If you need a developer who's confident working with Javascript, the skills matrix shows your best bet would be Beyoncé.
With your wish-list of consultants prepared, you can now check their availability and capacity. The top consultants are likely to be in high demand, so you may need to go back to the drawing board (your skills matrix) a few times to find people with the skills AND capacity to take on your project.
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Alternatively, you can create a bench report – also known as an availability report – to see who has spare capacity, and then use a skills matrix to see who is the best qualified. It’s up to you.
If you really can’t find the right people to fit your project schedule, you may need to consider adjusting the timetable to secure the consultants you need. Or using project placeholders to record the need for a consultant while you try to source one (eg through negotiation or recruitment).
Once you’ve created your project staffing schedule, depending on how things work in your organization, you may need to put in a resource request to ask for the consultants to be allocated to your project.
Learn more: How to Improve Your Resource Request Workflow ➡️
Now you’ve secured the consultants you need, you need to onboard them quickly and efficiently, so they’re ready to start work.
When the project is underway, you’ll need to monitor performance. Not only the performance of the consultants themselves, but how well your staffing is working.
Monitor performance and project management metrics to determine whether you need to make changes.
After the project is completed, review the staffing process to identify any areas for improvement. Did you overstaff? Under staff? Were your forecasts accurate? Did you secure the right skills? Analyzing the effectiveness of your resource management practices will help inform future project plans and improve forecasting accuracy.
We’ve touched on the problem of overbookings above. Research shows that work-life balance is a real problem in the consulting industry, where there is an expectation of long hours and overtime.
Consultants typically work 50-80 hour weeks and, in the big firms, 88% of consultants work overtime (rising to 100% in strategy consulting).
Think long hours come with the territory? That all-the-time overtime is ok? According to the World Health Organization, productivity and ‘professional efficacy’ decreases when employees are overworked.
Put simply, overtime may increase the quantity of hours consulting firms have available, but it decreases the quality of their output. And that’s the fast track to unhappy clients, expensive rework, and employee turnover.
If you think your company culture needs to change, here’s more evidence on the false economy of excessive consulting hours.
Monitoring the right metrics helps optimize resource allocation and project performance. Keeping an eye on KPIs throughout your project lets you spot any issues early and take corrective action before it’s too late. Here are some to be aware of.
One of the happiest shifts we’ve seen in recent years is the move towards more people-positive workplaces. By that, we mean organizations that see an intrinsic value in treating their people well.
People-positive workplaces create loyalty, engagement, and motivation simply by treating their employees like human beings not human resources.
In consulting firms, that means creating better work-life balance, and reflecting consultant preferences and career ambitions in their allocations.
Check out this article on The Ready Staffing Model to learn more from one of our favorite firms.
Runn resource management software includes everything you need to quickly and accurately staff consulting projects, combining the benefits of project management software with essential workforce planning tools.
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