Resource Forecasting Tool

Background

A technical consulting company faced significant challenges with forecasting and resource planning, which impacted their recruiting and hiring processes. Relying on manual methods to measure and plan for upcoming workloads made it difficult to accurately predict future resourcing needs.

As the company grew, tracking this information became increasingly difficult. There was no single source of truth for task and workload-related information. Without a central repository, the company struggled to scale, as managers were overwhelmed with daily operations and couldn’t adequately focus on planning for growth.

Challenges

Limited visibility into upcoming work affected resource planning and disrupted hiring timelines.
Managers struggled to quickly assess current workloads and the utilization of individual team members.
When adding tasks, it was difficult to understand how busy a team member was for the current day/week
This lack of visibility into individual employee utilization made it challenging to add and reassign tasks without overburdening team members.

Results

Increased employee satisfaction by preventing them from being overworked while maintaining a consistent workflow throughout the company.

Achieved smoother interactions with customers and team members by gaining visibility into workload requirements more than three weeks in advance.

Improved the overall recruiting process and increased the quality of hiring decisions with greater visibility into future resource requirements, allowing for a more proactive and effective recruiting process.

Solution

To enhance control and visibility, Axcend created a Resource Forecasting Tool allowing delivery teams to quickly update their current workloads and tasks, enabling managers to:

Identify workload hotspots: Quickly spot overburdened employees and determine where tasks can be reassigned.
Make quick adjustments: Easily move or assign work to different team members.
Reallocate existing tasks: Relieve overburdened employees by assigning tasks to those with available capacity.

Managers now have a quick and easy way to manage their team’s workload. This not only prevents employees from being overworked but also enables the management team to forecast future resourcing needs and make more informed hiring decisions. Instead of reacting to immediate demand, the organization can anticipate resource shortages well in advance and begin the hiring process with ample time to select the right resources.

Technologies

“Focus on being productive instead of busy”

Tim Ferris