Pick up a new set of operational habits

Operating touches on the core processes of running a consulting business. This checklist will ensure you align the Operating setup with your structures and responsibilities.

As with any new habit, it’s tempting to fall back on your old ways. Let’s make doing the right thing easy, especially when your colleagues see the system for the first time.

Setup

Before inviting others to Operating, the admin(s) should add the necessary organisational data.

Importing data and connecting with other tools

Bringing the list of your people to Operating is done in one of the following ways:

1. If you’re able to pull work allocation information in the preferred CSV format, that’s the best way forward

   1. If your allocations are in Harvest Forecast, it will be effortless. Simply take the weekly report from the project side.

   2. If your allocations are in another tool, try to get them as close to the format we highlight in the example csv below. The csv has weekly working hours for every week next to each other. Include all the future allocations and some historical data in your export

      Weekly Allocations Example Import.csv

   3. Contact our customer service and we’ll handle the importing for you → support@operating.app

2. If Harvest is your time tracking system ⇒ connect with Harvest

3. Connect your CRM. We have native integrations to HubSpot and Pipedrive

4. Connect with your HR system, e.g. HiBob

5. Add names, roles and other details manually in Directory

Once you’ve imported your people, you can edit their specific details in the Directory.

Site & Group setup

Replicate your company structure to Operating to find the right people and get the reports you need.

A successful site & group setup enables your teams to look and modify their own data intuitively.

You start with one site and group, which are named after your company. We recommend editing them as follows.

• Sites (Your company’s geographical locations like UK, under which you have London & Manchester)

• Groups

  • Competence teams like developers and designers

  • Internal teams like HR, Sales, Management

  • External/Subcontracting group (if you’re using external workforce, separate this as another base group next to your own company)

Each person has a Site: this determines their working hours (e.g. 40 hours per week), unless you give them individual working hours. You may also assign Holiday calendars to Sites, making it easy to have everyone e.g. in Sweden follow the Swedish bank holidays.

Permission setup

Under Settings ⇒ Permissions, you see the access rights granted to different permission sets.

You’re the Admin, and can do everything.

Decide: who are the Managers? (Typically: everyone assigning work, having discussions about team members’ actuals, managing teams, directors).

Adjust Manager and Employee permissions according to your liking. All of this can be edited later.

Groups, Roles and Part-time setup

First, make sure to add people to their relevant groups you’ve created.

Second, assign people one or more roles. Roles represent the key areas of expertise in your company. E.g. for a digital agency, the roles could be: developer, designer, and project manager. Don’t add detailed skill data just yet. Instead, keep the role selection limited in order to keep things manageable. When you’re adding roles to the system, make sure to also add seniority levels.

If anyone is working part-time, make sure to add their individual working hours under their consultant details. Read more about how part-time allocations work.

Project setup

Read more about how projects work.

Skill setup

Read the skill setup instructions to understand skill categories, levels, feelings and notes.

Organizing clients, projects and internal work

• The desired accuracy for project allocations in the timeline view: we recommend using “round to nearest 10%” accuracy, because these are plans and plans tend to change.

• The project/client hierarchy: group small streams under one “Client: ongoing work” project, but bigger projects (e.g. ones with budgets and managers) on their own – “ClientCorp: Digital Strategy 2030”. This depends on how you currently think of the work – defining factors might be managerial or budgetary concerns.

• Internal work: many ops roles are “always on”, such as salesperson’s 100% focus on sales. However, consider this an opportunity to split their work to meaningful chunks, such as “50% new business, 25% account management for ExampleCompany, 25% account management for miscellaneous clients”

  • Internal projects may benefit from a little bit of project planning: when does the work start, how much % should focus on it and when do you expect to enjoy the results? Enter the plan in Operating and see what that does to accountability.

• Time Off: we suggest to allow people to enter and edit their own Time Off allocations so that they get familiar with this kind of scheduling – and understand that finding everyone nice work to do, especially around the holiday seasons, can be complicated. Of course, keep following the time off approval processes your company is used to.

Inviting others

• If you use Single Sign-On (SSO), send an email to support@operating.app and we’ll set it up for you. You then control who has access and when with the SSO access control tools.

• If you don’t use SSO, follow instructions here:

  https://support.operating.app/help/articles/6829149-give-team-members-access-to-operating

How to maintain momentum

• Push yourself and your colleagues to have 90+% of the work inside Operating, 90% correctly

  • Only getting to 50% of all allocated work inside the system doesn’t help you make staffing decisions, unfortunately

  • Don’t stress if you never reach 100.0%, it’s OK to allow some room for interpretation and human error

    • It’s simply too much effort, and can kill the motivation of the project owners who have trouble finding out the exact details

• Show & update the Horizon and the Timeline in all staffing-related meetings (e.g. your sales weekly)

  • When videoconferencing, have the “chairperson” share their screen with Horizon

  • Everyone should share their point-of-view verbally, but ideally, people would add the up-to-date information to Timeline as soon as they know – instead of waiting for the meeting

    • It’s great to add notes if there’s something relevant missing from the timelines, for example adding that “the client decides before the end of month” will help plan other staffing scenarios

• Keep using Reports with team leads and P&L responsible people

  • If managers in your company are vague about how the business is doing, have them explain with the actual numbers

• Make sure people know that their skill profiles are considered when staffing – and actually do so!

  • Share your examples of ideal professional profiles: which roles and skills you wish to filter people with – and what level of detail is best

  • When suggesting a new assignment to a consultant, mention that “I noticed that your availability AND your skills AND your past experience AND your wishes might align quite nicely…”

• Stop using old excel sheets, enter the up-to-date info about 100% confirmed projects and uncertain opportunities to your CRM (and consequentially to Timeline)

  • Your sales team will enjoy the increased transparency and alignment as a side-effect

  • Operating is all about the core process for your whole consulting business, it’s not a spreadsheet someone put together to meet their own needs ⇒ you are an admin, but do your best to avoid becoming a gatekeeper

• Show that time tracking matters – not only for financial performance but also for visibility

  • Demonstrate transparency: here’s what the future could look like, this is the overall health of the company

  • Timeline + Reports + your interpretation = the big picture

• Share the User Guide with everyone.