Which software is suitable for consultancy firms?

Planning consultants sounds straightforward, until everyone is working on different client projects at the same time. A deadline shifts, a client requests additional work or a consultant turns out to have less capacity over the coming weeks. Before you know it, each individual project is on track, but the overall planning has become unworkable.

That is precisely the challenge of consultancy planning. You are not just planning projects, but allocating time, expertise and available capacity across different clients. For small consultancy firms, a calendar or Excel spreadsheet may still work perfectly well. As the number of consultants, projects and changes grows, it becomes increasingly important to bring project planning, capacity and resources together.

In this article, you’ll learn how to plan consultants efficiently across multiple projects, keep workloads visible and determine which planning software is right for your consultancy firm.

Why does planning at consultancy firms become complex so quickly?

On paper, planning consultants may not seem particularly complicated. You have a number of projects, a team of consultants and a plan that determines who works on which project and when.

In practice, however, that plan rarely stays the same for long.

A client requests additional work, a deadline is brought forward, a consultant unexpectedly has less time available or a project turns out to require more hours than initially anticipated. And while all this is happening, the other client projects continue as usual.

Imagine the following situation:

A consultancy firm has 25 consultants working on different client projects at the same time. Lisa works for client A on Monday and Tuesday, for client B on Wednesday, spends part of Thursday on internal work and works for client C on Friday. If you look at each project individually, there seems to be little cause for concern. All the work has been allocated and each client has their own plan.

Until client A calls to ask whether Lisa can take on additional work over the coming weeks. Suddenly, you need to know much more than what is happening within project A:

• How much capacity does Lisa still have over the next three weeks?
• Which other client projects are already in her plan?
• Which deadlines will come under pressure if you move work around?
• Is there another consultant with the right expertise and enough availability?
• Does the additional work fit within the team’s total capacity?
• And can you actually take on this extra assignment?

That is why consultancy planning quickly becomes about more than simply putting tasks on a calendar. Project planning, availability, capacity, workload and progress constantly affect one another. The more projects and consultants you have, the more important it becomes to view this information as a whole.

How do you plan consultants across multiple projects?

A common pitfall is that individual projects are planned perfectly well, while the overall picture does not add up.

Suppose three project managers all work with Lisa. The first plans her for eight hours for client A. The second needs her for client B that same week. And project manager three sees a free slot in their own plan and reserves it for client C.

Each individual project plan may look perfectly fine. Lisa's working week, perhaps less so.

That is why, when planning consultants, you should always be able to view the plan from two perspectives.

From the project perspective, you want to know what work needs to be done, when it needs to be completed and which people you need. From the consultant’s perspective, you want to see what someone is already working on, how much capacity they still have available and what other work is planned for the same period.

Only when you connect these two perspectives do you get a realistic plan.

What is resource planning for consultancy?

Resource planning is about intelligently allocating available people across projects and work. At a consultancy firm, this means looking not only at whether someone is theoretically available, but also at whether that consultant is a good fit for the project and what other commitments are already in the plan.

Suppose Lisa has no capacity left for the additional work for client A. You then want to explore whether a colleague can take it on. Perhaps Thomas still has capacity on Thursday and Friday, but his expertise is not suited to this assignment. Another consultant may have the right expertise, but is fully committed to another project for the next two weeks.

When allocating consultants, you therefore consider:

• available hours;
• ongoing client projects;
• role within a project;
• relevant expertise;
• internal work;
• leave or other absences;
• future workload.

Good resource planning makes these considerations clearer. Rather than simply allocating employees based on an empty slot in the calendar, you look at the broader combination of availability, capacity, expertise and existing project commitments.

How do you prevent consultants from being double-booked?

Double-booking often does not occur because one project has been planned incorrectly. The problem arises across different projects.

Project A and project B can each have a perfectly logical plan on their own, while the same consultant appears in both plans at the same time.

A central, cross-project plan helps identify this sooner. You can then see not only that Lisa is planned for sixteen hours for client A, but also which work for clients B and C is already in her plan. If you then add extra work, it becomes clear how this affects her overall workload.

For consultancy firms where several project managers use the same pool of consultants, this cross-project visibility is therefore at least as important as the planning within an individual project.

How do you gain insight into consultants’ available capacity?

Availability and capacity are sometimes used interchangeably. However, they are not quite the same thing.

A consultant may appear to be available according to the calendar, while part of their working week is already needed for internal work. And someone with a 40-hour contract does not automatically have 40 hours available for billable client work.

Realistic capacity planning therefore looks beyond contracted hours alone. In addition to client projects, the following activities also use capacity:

• internal discussions and team meetings;
• administration;
• business development and commercial activities;
• training and knowledge sharing;
• internal projects;
• leave and other absences.

If you leave these hours out of the equation, it will consistently appear as though more capacity is available than there actually is.

Capacity planning for consultancy means comparing consultants’ available time with the work that is already planned. This allows you to see not only how much capacity someone has today, but more importantly how much capacity will remain available over the coming weeks and months.

Take Lisa as an example again. She works 40 hours a week and is planned for 28 hours on client projects. At first glance, it looks as though she still has twelve hours available. But if four hours of internal meetings, four hours of training and two hours of administration are also planned, only two hours actually remain.

You want to know that difference before taking on a new project.

Good capacity planning also looks ahead

The most valuable insight is not how much capacity someone has today, but how their capacity will develop over the coming weeks or months.

Lisa may still have half a day available this week, for example, while being fully booked for the following three weeks. A colleague, on the other hand, may be quite busy this week but able to take on a new project from next Monday. If you only look at the current week, you could easily draw the wrong conclusion.

By planning further ahead, you can answer questions such as:

• Where will capacity issues arise over the coming weeks?
• Which consultants will have more capacity available?
• Can we start a new project on the desired date?
• Do we need to allocate work differently?
• Is additional capacity needed?
• Which deadlines will come under pressure if a project overruns?

This makes capacity planning useful not only for the person managing the plan. Project managers and commercial teams can also make better decisions when it is clear how much capacity is actually available.

How do you prevent consultants from becoming overloaded?

A full plan is not automatically a good plan.

In fact, when every available minute has already been allocated weeks in advance, even a small change can have a knock-on effect on the rest of the plan.

Suppose Lisa is planned for 20 hours for client A and 16 hours for client B. At first glance, that fits within a 40-hour working week. But add an internal meeting, administration and a training session, and her planned workload quickly exceeds her available capacity.

If this happens once, it may not be a major issue. If it happens consistently, however, it becomes a different story. Deadlines come under pressure, work has to be moved around at the last minute and employees have little room to deal with unexpected issues.

That is why visibility into workload is so important.

The aim is not to plan every consultant to exactly 100% capacity. Instead, you want to be able to see clearly:

• who still has sufficient capacity;
• who is approaching maximum capacity;
• where the plan exceeds the available hours;
• when a bottleneck is likely to arise;
• and where work could potentially be allocated differently.

This allows you to make adjustments before a capacity issue turns into a deadline problem.

How do you plan billable and internal work?

In consultancy, a great deal of attention is paid to billable hours. Understandably so, as client work is an important part of business operations. However, you will not get reliable capacity planning if you only include billable work.

After all, consultants also have internal responsibilities. These include team meetings, business development, administration, training, mentoring colleagues or working on internal projects.

Suppose a consultant is allocated 32 hours of client work. On paper, that appears to leave eight hours of capacity in a 40-hour working week. But when that same consultant spends four hours in internal meetings, has two hours of administration and also attends an internal training session, that spare capacity has almost disappeared.

By including billable and non-billable work in the same plan, you get a much more realistic picture of employees’ availability.

That does not mean, however, that you need to account for every minute of the working day. The aim is to gain enough insight to plan realistically, without turning the calendar into a digital version of Tetris.

Can we actually take on this new client project?

Capacity planning is not only relevant to planners and project managers. It also has a direct impact on sales.

A consultancy firm largely sells the time and expertise of its employees. When the sales team sells a new project, that assignment ultimately needs to fit somewhere in the plan.

Suppose a prospective client wants to start a project that requires two consultants for the next six weeks. From a commercial perspective, it could be an attractive assignment. But before committing to a start date, you want to know whether that capacity is actually available.

Without a central overview, this often leads to the familiar round of questions. Who has capacity next month? Can anyone move something around? Which projects will have finished by then? And how busy is team B actually?

With forward-looking capacity planning, you can answer those questions more concretely. You can see which capacity is available during the required period and then determine which consultants are a good fit for the assignment based on their expertise and existing plan.

This can lead to different outcomes. Perhaps the project can start immediately. Perhaps two weeks later is more realistic. Or perhaps the work only fits if existing work is allocated differently.

This makes planning valuable even before a project has begun. You connect the commercial promise with the capacity needed to deliver on that promise.

How do you stay on top of deadlines and progress?

Even the best plan changes. A client provides information later than expected, an analysis takes longer than anticipated, someone is temporarily unavailable or the scope of an assignment is expanded partway through. That is part of project-based work.

The problem, therefore, is not that a plan changes. The key question is how quickly you can see what impact that change has elsewhere. 

Suppose client B’s project overruns by two days and Lisa is therefore needed for longer. This may affect her work for client C. Perhaps part of the work can be postponed, perhaps someone else needs to step in or perhaps a deadline needs to be renegotiated.

When planning and progress are managed separately, you often only discover these consequences at a late stage. By connecting execution and planning, you can see sooner:

• which work has been completed;
• what is still outstanding;
• which deadlines are approaching;
• where delays are occurring;
• which consultant is needed for the remaining work;
• and which other projects will be affected when you shift capacity.

For consultancy firms, that last point is particularly important. A change within one client project can have a knock-on effect on several other projects.

Planned time versus actual time spent

The difference between planned and actual time spent also provides valuable information.

For example, you may find that a particular type of consultancy project consistently takes more time than originally planned. If an assignment is repeatedly planned for 24 hours while consultants actually spend closer to 32 hours on it, that is relevant information for future projects.

You can then plan new projects more realistically and gain a better understanding of the capacity actually required.

This means planning is no longer a static schedule that only tells you what you once intended to do. It becomes information that helps you make increasingly well-informed decisions about future projects.

Excel, project management software or capacity planning?

Not every consultancy firm needs to switch to comprehensive planning software straight away. The right solution depends mainly on the complexity of your organisation and planning.

For a firm with five consultants, a limited number of clients and few changes, Excel may still work perfectly well. As employees are increasingly allocated across different projects, more people manage the plan and changes occur more frequently, the limitations of manual planning become more apparent.

When is Excel sufficient?

Excel is flexible, familiar and quick to set up. There is little wrong with it for simple and reasonably stable plans.

The limitations become particularly apparent when information changes continuously or is maintained in different places. If project manager A makes a change, project manager B works with a different version and actual availability also has to be gathered from calendars, it takes increasingly more time to create a single reliable overview.

The relevant question, therefore, is not whether Excel is good or bad. A better question is: how much manual work is required to keep your plan up to date and reliable? 

When is project management software suitable?

Project management software is primarily designed to organise work within projects. You record which tasks need to be completed, who is responsible, what the deadlines are and what the progress is.

For consultancy firms, this can provide a great deal of structure. But as soon as consultants work on several projects at the same time, capacity also becomes an important consideration.

A project can be perfectly organised while the consultant who needs to carry out the work is already fully allocated to other assignments.

When do capacity and resource planning become relevant?

Capacity and resource planning become particularly important when people are the shared and limited resource across different projects.

You then want to know not only what Lisa needs to do for client A, but also how much time she has available next month, what else she is planned to work on and who could potentially take over some of the work.

For consultancy firms with many simultaneous client projects, a combination of project planning, capacity planning and resource planning is therefore a natural choice.

What requirements should software for consultancy firms meet?

A long list of features does not say much in itself. What matters more is whether the software answers the questions that keep coming up in day-to-day planning.

For example, can you quickly see who is available next week? Is it clear when the same consultant is planned across different projects? Can you include internal work when calculating available capacity? And can you see what happens to other projects when an assignment overruns?

When comparing software for a consultancy firm, I would therefore look at the following as a minimum:

• Cross-project planning. You want to be able to see not only individual client projects, but also how all projects come together in the overall plan.
• Capacity and availability. How much capacity do consultants and teams have now and in future periods?
• Resource planning. Can you allocate employees across projects while taking their availability, role and expertise into account?
• Workload. Is it clear when someone still has plenty of capacity or is exceeding their available capacity?
• Billable and internal work. Can you include both to get a realistic picture of capacity?
• Deadlines and progress. Can you connect planned work with what is actually happening?
• Flexible replanning. Can you easily process changes and see which other projects or employees are affected as a result?
• Planned time and reporting. Can you track planned utilisation and use that information to plan future projects more realistically?
• Integrations. Does the plan integrate with systems and processes your organisation already uses?

These elements also align with the briefing, which explicitly identifies project planning, capacity, workload, roles, deadlines, progress, replanning and reporting as relevant selection criteria.

When is vPlan suitable for a consultancy firm?

When consultants are regularly allocated across different client projects, it becomes increasingly important to look beyond individual projects. You want to understand how all the work comes together in the plan for your employees and teams.

vPlan therefore becomes particularly useful if you recognise some of these situations:

• consultants regularly work for multiple clients;
• different project managers use the same employees;
• availability is currently gathered from different calendars, spreadsheets or systems;
• you want to identify capacity issues in advance;
• changes to one project affect other projects;
• internal and billable work need to come together in the plan;
• you want to assess more accurately whether there is capacity for new client work.

Take Lisa as an example one more time.

Client A requests additional work. Instead of looking only at project A, you first want to see her overall plan. If Lisa has no capacity, you want to find out which colleague is available. If the work is added, you want to see what that means for the workload and other planned work. And if the project subsequently overruns, the plan needs to be easy to adjust.

Ultimately, good consultancy planning is therefore not just about who does what and when? 

The more interesting question is:

Do we have sufficient capacity to deliver our projects effectively while still having room to take on new work?

For a small consultancy firm with a few straightforward projects, Excel may still be sufficient to answer that question. But as the number of consultants, client projects and interdependencies grows, having one central plan becomes increasingly valuable.

Want to see how to bring projects, consultants and capacity together in one plan? Discover how vPlan works and see how you can create greater visibility in your consultancy firm’s planning.