Founder in Eleven

When people ask, “What is the one thing you would recommend for professional service founders that had the biggest positive impact on your company?” I would confidently say the daily/weekly/quarterly huddle.  Whether derived from my different business groups or the combination of the Rockefeller Habits/Traction books, getting the managers together on a daily basis resulted in substantial benefits for our people, customers, and firm.  This post will present our best practices for conducting a daily/weekly/quarterly huddle.

Staffing – Why Is It So Important?

The most important function of the daily huddle is staffing, or “who is working on what today.”  David Maister, in Managing the Professional Services Firm, devotes Chapter 16 to the importance of scheduling.  Relevant points include:

• “The scheduling of work assignments is the single most important managerial activity in a professional services firm.  Whoever makes the work assignment decisions is the person really managing the practice.”
• “By allocating the right resources to different assignments, there is the opportunity to influence the cost of the work, its quality and the timeliness of its delivery”
• “Over time the pattern of assignments given to professionals will profoundly influence their professional development, their worth to the firm and to clients, their satisfaction with the firm, and, as a result, their motivation and productivity.” 
• “Assignments will also play a large role in the dissemination of expertise throughout the firm.”

Given the importance of scheduling on career, client services, and long-term profitability, all managers should  take responsibility and provide input rather than any one person.  When done correctly, the daily huddle spreads decision making across the project managers, mentors, and senior leadership to make good staffing decisionsevery day.

Staffing – Before the Huddle

Whether a large or small firm, staffing is typically the responsibility of a staffing coordinator or some other staffing czar.  This staffing resource must balance profitability, client service, skill building, as well as motivation and morale.  Added pressure comes from the project managers or sales team in that they will typically push for the best team they can get without concern for staff skill building, motivation, or other managers’ client requirements.

Early in my career at Andersen Consulting, I had the responsibility of training resources with basic client server skills, many of which were on a new project for a retail client.  After a couple of months, I noticed many of them were leaving the firm with complaints about the project.  When I passed along these concerns to the project manager, he gave a memorable response: “ You always loose some foot soldiers storming the hill.”   This mentality can exist and is often rewarded at large firms. However, for small firms that want to focus on long-term staff growth, culture, and retention, what are the ramifications to the project manager that is causing overworked staff to quit?   A project manager might be praised on his client service and profitability, but driving his staff too hard to the point where they quit sacrifices the potential for the employee’s long-term success for the company. When measured only on client service and profitability, a project manager might be rewarded for driving his staff hard.  Project managers should also be measured on skill building, motivation and morale.

To illustrate the differences between a staffing czar approach and huddle approach, let’s take an example of a typical decision-making process for staffing a new project:  A manager has just sold a new project to an existing client.  This project will require oversight from a project manager.  The project manager would like to have one lead analyst and two developers added to the project as soon as possible because the timeframe is tight, as typical with most new projects. Below is the step-by-step discussion between the project manager and the staffing czar.

1. The project manager approaches the staffing czar with the request.
2. The staffing czar says that there are two staff and one analyst available.
3. The project manager has concerns about the available resources as the project manager has not worked with them before and the analyst or staff has not done this type of project before.
4. The project manager requests resources that are billable on other roles on other projects because the project manager has heard good things about them performing the work for another client.
5. The staffing czar tries to “work a deal” with the other project managers.
6. The other project managers push back to retain their resources for their projects.
7. The staffing czar determines staffing based on trying to make both project managers happy, most likely by leaving staff in their current projects.

In the above staffing decision, there is not a discussion of what is best for the resources’ development, rather a focus on what is best for the project managers. 

Staffing – With a Huddle

With a huddle approach, all the project managers meet first thing in the morning (we would typically do 8:45 to push for ending at 9:00). For small firms under 75 people, a conference call or zoom can easily be set up to begin the rhythm of a daily meeting.  I would recommend capping the number of people to roughly 20 at most, with client projects setting up their own huddles to begin the day. Our meeting would cover the following topics:

1. The project manager announces to the group that they have sold a new project (hopefully as part of a “good news” opening with congratulations from attendees).
2. The project manager announces the upcoming roles; the entire team would be aware that the unbillable resources that are available.
3. The project manager expresses concern to the group about not having enough experience on the team with the unbillable resources.
4. The entire team (previous project managers as well as mentors) would brainstorm and “work a deal” leveraging the entire managerial input team.

With the whole team (and incentives) pushing for profitability and client services, the mentors and project managers can work together to balance the resource needs across the team.  Likely outcomes include:

• The project manager on another project can offer his/her resource that could be finishing off their current project.  The mentor can confirm that this resource would be a good fit based on the knowledge from a mentoring meeting.
• The mentor can suggest his/her counselee as someone that has done something similar and has expressed an interest in pursuing this type of assignment.
• The project manager can free up a resource from his/her current project based on recent client timeframe slippage.
• The team of project managers can push back on the timeline, staffing, and goals of the project to ensure that the staffing is correct, and offer ways to make staffing fit every goal.

Huddle – Impact on Culture

Our firm found it helpful to invite resources with 3+ years of experience to the huddle to participate in staffing decisions.  Being able to participate in an open discussion about how people are staffed promotes transparency, and allows everyone to know how the firm’s values surrounding career and client service are driving daily sales and staffing decisions.  From a culture and delegation-of-duties perspective, pushing the staffing decision away from a staffing czar or manager and towards the team results in better decisions along with group consensus, allowing the firm to quickly pivot resources day-by-day where they were needed most.

Huddle – More than just staffing

While staffing drives the bulk of the huddle discussions, other topics can be raised while the managers are together, including:

• R&D updates or possible staffing needs
• Marketing updates or possible staffing needs
• Client and sales updates
• Recruiting updates

 A tight huddle time-frame (1 hour on Mondays to schedule staffing for the week, and 15 minutes for the daily huddle Tuesday through Friday) worked best.  With a predetermined amount of time for each huddle, conversations become very efficient.  If discussions go long, managers should schedule meetings outside of the huddle with relevant players for a deeper dive.

Huddle – Start with “Good News”

IT services too often struggle with client issues—both technical and relationship—that can make staff pessimistic, leading to the team complaining amongst themselves.  To avoid the huddle turning into a complaint session, we found it best to always start the huddle with “good news,” no matter how trivial.  While the huddle may still allow a chance for staff to complain in what should be a problem-solving environment, starting with good news switches the overall mood to positive and reduces the urge to vent with peers.

Huddle – Quarterly

Every three months, our team got together for a day or half-day to:

• Review the financial and other results of the quarter
• Set new goals for the next quarter

Typical agendas involved training (sales, negotiation, etc.) as well as R&D/ client service brainstorming.  After the quarterly meeting, the goals were broken into easily-monitored daily goals (ex: hours billed per day) that the managers could review in the daily huddle and make adjustments appropriately to staffing if the quarterly goal was not being met. 

Huddle – Best Practices

In summation, here are strategies for having effective huddles:

• Data:  Some type of time report needs to be available each day for “who” is working on “what” and “when.”  Project managers will have a desire to keep their resources to themselves when possible.  Therefore, data helps the managers see who is billable and who is not.  A daily review can avoid the “hiding” practice.
• Start with Good News:  Daily interactions between managers can cause them to complain about their clients or staff.  Kicking off the meeting with “good news” no matter how trivial gets managers talking positively and sets the right tone.
• Weekly Staffing:  Focus Monday mornings on staff planning for the entire week.  Forecasting each resource (“who” is working on “what”) is key input for evaluations, mentors, and tracking against daily actual data reporting.
• Begin with most junior-level staffing: Start every meeting with junior level staff that are not billable.  Whether they are working on internal R&D, training, or other areas, the team of managers should be focused on getting juniors billable first to avoid the “under-delegation issue.”

Conclusion

The huddle is a method to push responsibility away from just senior resources to the team of managers and has been shown in our firm to have positive impacts on culture, productivity, client services, skill development, motivation, and morale.