Staffing Routine with Operating

A staffing routine has two halves that depend on each other: keeping allocations current all week, and a weekly meeting to align the team on what to staff next. The meeting is only as good as the plan going into it — so the everyday habit of keeping allocations up to date is what makes the meeting fast and the capacity forecast trustworthy. The UI steps for finding people and managing Allocations live in the linked how-tos; this guide is the cadence and the agenda.

When to run it

The upkeep is continuous — people keep their plans current as work shifts. The meeting is a standing weekly slot, for example Monday 11:00–12:00; sixty minutes is enough once the habit forms.

Who's involved

Resourcing leads the meeting. Anyone who brings in new work — sales, key account managers — attends or has their cases processed in their absence. And everyone who does the work helps keep their own Allocations current.

Part 1 — Keep allocations current all week

The meeting can't fix a plan that isn't there and using the meeting to manually add allocations to Operating is not an efficient use of everyone’s time (Claude and our MCP server can do that automatically: AI chat (LLM) via MCP), so the real groundwork happens continuously:

• Make updating plans everyone's habit. People add new tentative work as it appears and extend confirmed Allocations that continue into the future. Adding upcoming plans can feel intimidating at first, but it's the habit that makes everything else work — and be ruthless about archiving far-fetched ideas, so only probable needs sit in the list.

• Motivate the team with the payoff. When plans are current, people get pulled into the right opportunities, the capacity forecast is accurate, and you can recruit the next colleague at the right time.

• Keep decisions visible. Use Slack or Teams to share staffing decisions made outside the meeting and link back to Operating, so the weekly session is never a surprise — it's a shared-understanding meeting, not where plans first appear.

• Bring won work in cleanly. If a CRM is connected, won deals flow in as Projects; either way, when a deal is won, run a proper handover so the plan and team transfer intact. See How do I hand a won deal over from sales to delivery?.

Part 2 — Run the weekly staffing meeting

One-time setup

This routine assigns a Staffing Owner per Project. That's Operating's Secondary Project Owner feature — enable it once in Settings → Projects and name it "Staffing Owner." Each owner can then filter to their own cases with Staffing Owner is "me."

Prep before each meeting

• Add any new tentative work as tentative Allocations, and refresh the CRM connection if you have one.

• Pin a Projects view filtered to Project status is Tentative (group by deal stage if a CRM is connected) — your pipeline.

• Pin a Positions view filtered to Person is None — your open Positions and staffing needs.

See How to create, pin, share, and edit views for pinning views.

1. Projects to be staffed (~20 min)

Work top to bottom through the tentative Projects (your pinned Tentative view), discussing which are most urgent. For each:

• Build a best-guess team setup — role, site, skill, and Allocation per Position, as detailed as you can. It doesn't need to be perfect this early; it just needs to be enough to suggest the right people in the next step.

• Assign a Staffing Owner. Each owner can keep a personal to-do list with a Positions view filtered to Person is None AND Staffing Owner is "me."

• Suggest candidates. On the open-Positions view (Person is None), use the suggest action to discuss who fits each role. See How to find available people for a project.

• Schedule on the Timeline. Move to the Timeline — it shows Projects and people together, so you can see who's free and fits the team setup. Add names to unfilled roles, and paint the Allocations for the work that starts now. If a Project later slips, reschedule its start date and the Allocations shift with it. See How to manage allocations.

• Decide, and arrange the start. For roles that must be decided now, talk to each person and book time for preparation before the work begins — for example, an internal kick-off.

• Keep the list honest. Confirm the cases you're sure of; archive or push out the ones that aren't happening (Operating keeps the history either way, so the data isn't lost). Close by asking the room whether anything is missing and whether each case's owner is clear — add any missing Projects on the spot, and merge any duplicate a CRM may have created.

2. People with availability (~20 min)

Go through the People list by sorting the view so that the most available people in the next 7/30 days show on the top of the page. If Part 1 was done well, most rows already show tentative ideas to react to. For each person with gaps:

• Discuss how they could help win pipeline work — drafting proposals, prepping for interviews, getting ready to hit the ground running.

• For anyone with an empty row, open their profile and find useful work — following up on past Projects, supporting colleagues, internal or account work — even when it isn't all billable.

• The goal is to push people off the bench rather than wait for a Project to pull them in. Assign action points: who contacts whom.

3. Capacity forecast and hiring signals (~10 min)

Read the Capacity view together:

• Is there enough work? Enough billable work booked, plus a healthy amount of tentative pipeline — you won't win every proposal.

• Is sales balanced? Group the view by Roles, Groups, or People to see whether you're proposing across all your offering areas.

• Should you hire? If a role or skill is consistently thin, recruitment may need to speed up — hiring takes months. Use the Capacity view filters to check specific roles and skills.

Assign action points. See What is capacity and how is it calculated? and Using the capacity report for hiring decisions.

Downloadable version

Here’s the same Staffing Routine as a downloadable PDF: