Columbia Road: running a transparent, efficient consulting operation with a human touch

Columbia Road has rapidly grown to over 150 consultants and established offices in multiple countries. To maintain high performance while providing transparency to the operations as the company grows, Columbia Road recognised the need to update their core systems and processes. Columbia Road uses Operating to match consultants to right projects based on their skills and preferences, predict capacity to make better decisions, and to understand the use of time to run an efficient operation.

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Problem

After rapid growth, Columbia Road’s internal tools no longer provided the decision-making capability needed to run a multi-country consulting operation with 150+ people. The use of Harvest as the time tracking system, and Harvest Forecast as the resource management tool with multiple custom spreadsheets made decision-making making slower and focus started to divert from what’s important. There was no clear view of the consultants' skillsets, and planning capacity and client demand required a lot of manual work.

For Columbia Road, it is crucial to foster the transparent & self-organizing way of working even as their headcount grows, enabling people to decide on how they spend their time in order to reach the best impact.

Solution

Operating helps Columbia Road:

• Plan upcoming projects in the sales pipeline to build optimal teams for projects
• Predict capacity per competence, role, location etc. to know who to hire, and where to focus on in sales
• Visualize consultants' skills, staffing preferences, and project history to match people to the right projects
• Understand everyone’s use of time so everyone plan their work without micromanagement

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Approach

Operating was first taken into use by the sales & staffing team. The customer success team at Operating ensured that the current project portfolio was updated to Operating in just a few hours, while all the people were automatically imported using a native Harvest integration. First, the sales & staffing team used Operating to plan teams for upcoming projects and after a successful pilot, all consultants were invited to update their skill profiles and allocations. In a short amount of time, Columbia Road had onboarded their entire company to Operating, bringing much-needed visibility to their decision-making.

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Results

• Less time spent on staffing: Columbia Road’s staffing meetings now focus on tactical & strategic planning instead of copy-pasting information across systems.
• Replaced a resource management tool & spreadsheets: Columbia Road was able to eliminate a lot of busywork and replace an existing tool.
• Utilization improvements: Predicting capacity and understanding time spent gives less room for error while helping everyone focus on client work.
• More transparency in communication: consultants can see the upcoming sales pipeline and make sure their skills are being considered in staffing.

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