Shine a Spotlight on Human Capital Supply-Chain Management to Differentiate Your Market Position

Successful professional services organizations, like AthleticsOpens a new window , a creative design agency in New York City, and Charlotte-based marketing firm Union, grow their businesses by making their companies a magnet for talent, both internal and external. At a time when more employees want to work from home, full or part-time, or work for themselves, understanding the nature of the human capital supply chain is more important than it has ever been. Having the right people, with the right skills, at the right time and with the right economics is what allows you to strike the necessary balance between meeting the demands of your current clients and growing your business. 

Establishing a high-functioning human capital supply-chain management system does not obviate the need for humans to oversee the acquisition, allocation and application of available talent, both within and outside the firm. Technology to support the Services industry has accelerated past the limits of the financial-centric “PSA” of the past to embrace a people-powered perspective. 

Jameson Proctor, executive digital director and partner, Athletics, is a self-professed devotee of the teachings of the book “Growing PainsOpens a new window ” by Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle. First published in 1986, it has become a go-to resource for startup founders trying to guide the transition of their companies from startups to large, professionally-managed organizations. 

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Empower Your Business To Fill Organizational Development Gap

One key lesson Proctor took away from the book is identifying the symptoms of an organizational development gap: the space between the infrastructure a company’s leaders have to run their agencies and the infrastructure they need to grow. Filling that gap requires acquiring the resources and implementing effective management systems, processes, and organization required to scale and grow, not simply “going with your gut.” Empower your business with a winning culture that matches the right people with the right opportunities on a continuous basis.  

“When we started to approach 20+ team members and the $5 million gross profit mark, my business partners and I realized we couldn’t run the agency by saying, ‘Hey, that sounds good; we should be able to take this project on and deliver it on time and at quality,’” says Proctor, laughing. “You get to the point where you feel the speed of your growth wobbling the wheels and realize it’s time to make some changes.”

The first steps for Proctor and his business partners were to understand the resources and time needed to deliver client work at the highest levels of innovation and quality, then use that data to quickly make critical decisions around account growth, new business, and hiring.

But that data collection and analysis can be more difficult than it sounds, warns Albert Banks, vice president of operations and partner, Union. He said when his leadership team tried to generate growth forecasts, they discovered that most of the data they collected was backward-looking. 

“We could only make adjustments for three months out, not in real-time, and that presented a major challenge,” says Banks. “To make matters more complex, the data was scattered across sales leads, project management buckets, invoicing, and other disparate places. That forced us to spend too much time building elaborate spreadsheets and custom web apps to tie all these data sources together and keep them up to date.”

Banks says the “ah ha” moment came when the firm lost a significant client, which forced him to reflect on why the client decided to leave.  

“We had to figure out a new course forward and that’s when we discovered it was very challenging to identify the holes and where we needed to invest to become more future facing,” he adds.

Implement Technology and Inspire Employees to Adopt It

Union’s leadership team made technology investments a top priority to help them collect and analyze data. The goals were to reduce manual processes such as updating spreadsheets, consolidating data repositories, and gaining a view into real-time data instead of relying only on historical data to improve resource capacity planning and revenue forecasting. 

“We want to be able to consistently analyze this information to discover insights and leverage them as quickly as possible to make changes that would have an immediate impact,” he says. 

This requires 100% adoption from your entire workforce. Today’s modern, people-centric collaboration and work management applications make it easier for your people to embrace new technology. Both Banks and Proctor strongly advise implementing new technologies along with a robust and sustained training and change management program. 

“Share how using technology will help us grow sustainably and profitably with all of your team members,” says Banks. “Training employees on how to use new technologies isn’t enough, they must also understand why you want to use the data those tools provide to inform future decisions. Data is only as powerful as it is accurate, relevant and reviewed, understood and acted upon. If you’re not doing that, why bother collecting it?” 

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Proctor says conveying this intelligence to his team members became much easier after they also formally established a resource management function and role within his company. That action was an instrumental outcome of the management team’s structured goal-setting exercise: identify those areas where they were ineffectively leveraging technology to manage their entire human capital supply-chain and have someone take ownership of it. 

“We’ve been able to synthesize our institutional knowledge of how work gets delivered with the business intelligence around resource utilization that we can get on-demand from our technology,” says Proctor. “That’s very important for weekly meetings where we review all resourcing decisions with individual team leads responsible for delivering the work. We are able to have informed conversations about the most effective way to leverage our entire workforce to allocate resources and optimize every aspect of our business. 

Making human capital and a supply-chain orientation central to your business and technology strategy will differentiate your brand by having the highest levels of operational maturity, leading to more successful and predictable business outcomes. In the future, successful firms will operate in an ever-expanding services ecosystem to ensure the availability of talent to meet the specific needs of their clients.

How are you ensuring talent availability in your organization to meet client requirements? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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