How Consulting COOs Can Get Visibility Into Capacity, Sales Time, and Project Staffing

A COO at a 250-person management consulting firm faced a common challenge: no clear visibility into how consultants were spending their time. The firm struggled to answer three essential questions:

• Who is available, and when?
• How much time is spent on client delivery versus sales?
• Who is the right person for the next project or pitch?

These gaps made it hard to manage workload, forecast capacity, and staff projects with confidence. Here’s how consulting leaders can address each issue with modern resource planning and professional services automation (PSA) tools.

Problem 1: Consultant Availability and Team Workload (Utilization Rates)

Visibility into consultant availability needs to work at multiple levels:

Individual Consultant View

Leaders need to see each person’s schedule — which projects they’re booked on, confirmed assignments, tentative allocations, and time off. This helps identify overbooked consultants and those about to roll off projects.

Project View

At the project level, managers should see when projects start and end, what resources are allocated, and whether the work is covered. Within a project, they can check people’s allocations and adjust if anyone is unavailable.

Team View

Partners and managers want to monitor their teams as a group. Grouping by role, skill, or business unit — with saved views for regular reporting — provides visibility into team workload, utilization, and billable vs. non-billable hours.

Company-Level Forecasting

COOs need a big-picture capacity forecast. PSA tools can show overall availability across roles, sites, and teams, with drill-down options to spot where hiring or rebalancing may be needed.

Problem 2: Tracking Sales Time (Billable vs. Non-Billable Hours)

In consulting, client delivery isn’t the only demand. Firms also expect consultants to support sales and business development. Without a system, this non-billable time disappears into the background.

A simple fix is to create internal “business development” projects in your PSA software:

• Add a prospect or client.
• Label the project as non-billable.
• Allocate consultants to record hours on pitches, proposals, or sales support.

This ensures:

• Sales efforts are visible alongside client work.
• Utilization reports reflect both paid client hours and non-billable sales time.
• COOs can better balance workload expectations.

Problem 3: Assigning the Right People to Projects (Staffing and Matching)

Staffing the right consultant on the right project is a common pain point. The COO’s firm often struggled to match availability, skillsets, and seniority.

With resource allocation software, staffing managers can:

• Filter consultants by role, seniority, skills, and availability.
• Match requirements like “HTML knowledge” or “strategy expertise” to available talent.
• Get automated suggestions for the best fit.

Instead of manually scanning spreadsheets, managers can assign staff in minutes. This ensures projects and pitches get the right people quickly.

Conclusion

The COO’s challenges reflect common issues in consulting: limited visibility into availability, hidden sales time, and difficulty staffing projects.

With a PSA platform like Operating.app, firms can:

• See team workload and consultant availability across individual, team, and company views.
• Track both billable and non-billable hours, including sales work.
• Staff projects faster by matching consultants to roles and skills.

The result is higher utilization, better staffing, and improved profitability — without hours of manual reporting.