If we win this project, can we staff it, and at what margin?

TL;DR

To answer this question you need four things in one place: which deal it is, how likely it is to close, who is free in the months the work starts, and what those people cost. Most firms keep these in four different systems. The CRM has the deal. A spreadsheet has the staffing plan. A time tracking tool has the hours. The accounting system has the costs. Nobody puts them together until the contract is already signed.

Put them together earlier and the answer takes minutes. You take the deal, scale it down by how likely it is to close, compare that to who is genuinely free, and price whatever you are short of. Firms of 50 to 2,000 people who work this way get several months of extra warning before they have to hire. They also lose fewer margin points to contractors booked at the last minute.

The question every operations lead gets asked

A deal is at 60%. It starts in ten weeks. Someone asks whether you can deliver it.

Most firms cannot answer that in the meeting. Sales knows the deal. Delivery knows roughly who is busy between now and the end of the quarter. Finance knows last month's margin. No single person has all three, so the firm agrees to the work and finds out later whether it can staff it.

The problem is timing. You have to decide before you sign. The information you would need only comes together after you have signed.

What you need in order to answer

There are four things. If any one of them is missing or out of date, the answer is a guess.

1. The deal, and how likely it is to close. This is an opportunity rather than a signed project, so it has a value, a start date, and a percentage. A deal at 60% still needs a full team if it closes. You cannot staff 60% of a project.

2. The roles and hours the work will take. Turn the deal into people rather than revenue. Two data engineers from November. A lead engineer at half time. An analytics lead for the first six weeks. Then scale those numbers down by the 60%, and you have what you should be planning for.

3. Who is actually free. This is not how many people you employ. It is how many hours each role has spare in the months the work starts, once you take out current projects, holidays, and internal work.

4. What it costs to cover the shortfall. If the work needs more people than you have free, you hire someone, you bring in a contractor, or you move someone off another project. Each one costs a different amount. Each one takes a different amount of time to arrange.

A worked example

Take a 120-person data and AI consultancy. The numbers below are made up, to show the method.

The deal. A nine-month programme worth €540,000, at 60%, starting on 1 November.

The work it needs. One lead data engineer full time, two data engineers full time, and one analytics lead at half time. That comes to 3.5 full-time people for nine months. At 60%, the firm should be planning for 2.1 full-time people from November.

Who is free. In November, once current projects and booked holidays are taken out, the firm has 1.4 full-time people spare in those roles.

The shortfall. 0.7 people at 60%, or 2.1 people if the deal closes. Either way the firm is short, and it is short from November.

How long hiring takes. A senior data engineer takes about eleven weeks to hire, and about four more weeks before they are productive. That is fifteen weeks in total. To have someone working on 1 November, you would need to start recruiting in mid-July. That is before the deal even reached 60%, and long before anyone would normally think to ask.

What it does to margin. Miss that point and you cover the shortfall with contractors instead. A contractor at €95 an hour against €62 an hour internally, across roughly 1,300 hours, costs an extra €42,900 on €540,000 of revenue. That is about eight points of margin, lost to a hiring decision nobody made back in July.

Every one of those numbers could have been worked out in July. In most firms they simply were not in the same place.

What each type of system can and cannot do

Only the bottom two rows answer the whole question. Everything above them answers part of it, which is why so many firms end up with a spreadsheet joining the pieces together by hand.

How this works in Operating

Operating keeps all four things in one place.

Deals come in from the CRM. Operating connects to HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive, so an open deal becomes a possible project without anyone retyping it. The percentage from the CRM comes across with it.

You see possible work next to confirmed work. Pipeline Projects shows the roles you would need across both clients and prospects on one screen. That is how the November shortfall becomes visible in July instead of October.

Availability is by role and skill, not by headcount. Because people have skill profiles and levels, "two data engineers" turns into named people who could actually do the work, with their free hours in those months. This is the main job of resource management in Operating.

Rate cards and cost cards turn the shortfall into money. The staffing forecast and the revenue forecast come from the same plan, so what a contractor or a late hire does to margin is a figure you can read rather than a guess.

Timesheets correct the forecast. Operating compares the hours you planned against the hours people logged, so next quarter's forecast is based on what happened rather than on what you hoped would happen.

Pricing, as of 2026: Resourcing is $13 per person per month if you pay annually, or $15 monthly. Timesheets are $17 and $19. The full suite, which adds revenue recognition, invoicing, and accounting connections, is $21 and $23. Setup takes days rather than months.

On integrations, plainly. Operating connects directly to HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, Xero, HiBob, Harvest, and Flowcase. There is a full REST API, and an MCP server, so assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can read your availability and book people in. There is no ready-made Fivetran, Workato, or Asana connector. If your data team is happy to build against an API, that suits us well. If you need a packaged connector into a data warehouse, another tool will suit you better today.

Who should not do it this way

• Firms under about 50 people with one delivery team. You can hold all of this in a spreadsheet and a weekly meeting. Buy a tool when that meeting stops working.
• Firms whose work is not organised as projects. If you run ongoing managed services with settled teams, you do not have this problem in the same way.
• Firms whose CRM is out of date. If nobody keeps the deal percentages current, joining the CRM to your staffing plan will give you wrong answers faster than the spreadsheet did.

Frequently asked questions

When does winning a new project mean we have to hire, and what does that do to margin?

Start with the deal and how likely it is to close. Turn it into the roles and hours the work will take, then scale those down by the percentage. Compare that to who is free in the months the work starts. To find out when you need someone, count backwards from the start date by how long hiring takes, including the weeks before a new person is productive. That date is usually earlier than people expect. In the worked example on this page it was mid-July, for a project starting on 1 November. To find out what happens to margin, price the shortfall: an employee, a contractor, or someone moved off another project each cost a different amount.

How far ahead can we plan staffing from the sales pipeline?

As far ahead as your pipeline is honest. In practice most firms find deals become reliable enough to plan against once the scope and start date are agreed, which is often the "contract sent" or "verbal commitment" stage. Earlier stages are still useful for spotting a busy period coming, but not for putting a named person against the work.

Should we plan against the weighted or the unweighted pipeline?

Use both, for different decisions. The weighted figure tells you what to hire against, because it allows for the deals that will not close. The unweighted figure tells you what you would have to deliver if every deal came in, which is the risk you are carrying.

What does it cost to spot a staffing shortfall too late?

Usually one of three things. You pay contractor rates instead of employing someone. You cut the scope to fit the team you have. Or you push the start date back. In the worked example on this page, covering a shortfall of 2.1 people with contractors cost about eight points of margin on a €540,000 programme.

Can a CRM tell us whether we can staff a deal?

No. A CRM holds the deal and the percentage, but it does not know who is free, what they cost, or what the margin would be. That is why firms that plan staffing well connect the CRM to a resource planning tool rather than replacing it.

Do we need a full professional services suite to plan staffing and margin?

Not always. You need the deal, the work it will take, who is free, and what they cost. A resource planning tool with a proper CRM connection and rate cards covers all four. A full suite adds invoicing, revenue recognition, and accounting, which are worth having for other reasons.