Business practice
Headcount planning.
An honest read on which pressure is a staffing problem and which is a process problem, with capacity measured rather than estimated, before the offer goes out.
When the work piles up the instinct is to hire, and sometimes that is right.
The problem is that a hire is the most expensive way to find out you were wrong. It takes months to arrive, months to be useful, and if the pressure was coming from a process rather than from volume, the new person inherits the same broken week their colleagues have.
So the question gets answered before the offer goes out. Capacity measured rather than guessed at, the pressure split into the part a fix absorbs and the part that genuinely needs a person, and a plan you can put in front of a board or a partner group without being asked for evidence you do not have.
The approach
Three words we work by.
Measure.
Current capacity gets counted rather than estimated. Where the hours actually go, how much of the week is recurring work, and how much is rework caused upstream. People are generally accurate about being busy and unreliable about where the time went, which is why this is measured.
Separate.
The pressure is split honestly. Some of it is real volume and needs a person. Some of it is a process that a fix absorbs, and hiring into it buys you a second person doing avoidable work. You get both numbers, and the second one is usually larger than expected.
Defend.
The plan is written to survive the questions a board or a partner group will ask. What the role covers, what was tried first, what happens to the numbers if it is approved and what happens if it is not. Evidence attached, so approval turns on the case rather than on conviction.
The work
Four workstreams, in sequence.
Capacity measurement
Where the hours in the affected team actually go, taken from your systems and from a short structured look at the work rather than from a survey. Recurring work, exception handling and rework separated, because they lead to different answers.
Process and staffing split
The pressure divided into what a process fix absorbs and what needs a person. Each fix sized by the hours it returns and the effort to make it, so the comparison against a salary is a like for like one.
Role definition
Where a hire is genuinely the answer, the role written from the work it takes on: the tasks, the decisions it owns, who it relieves, and what has to be true within ninety days for it to have worked.
Board ready plan
The case assembled as a short document: what was measured, what was tried, what is recommended, and what the numbers do either way. Built to be read by people who were not in any of the conversations.
Related reading.
All insights
Operations
The two-person dependency test
Pick any critical workflow and ask one question. If these two specific people were both unreachable for a week, what happens. If the honest answer is that things quietly stop, you have found the real risk register of your firm, and it does not appear in
Retention
The six questions that find churn before it finds you
Every firm that has lost a client it did not expect to lose has the evidence sitting somewhere in an inbox. The six questions below take about an hour to work through and they will surface the pattern, but only if you are willing to run them against
Questions
Asked before, answered plainly.
If the case is clear it is a short exercise that gives you evidence to put behind it, and it takes weeks rather than a quarter. Where it earns its place is the other outcome: finding that some of the pressure comes from a process, which changes the size of the role or the timing of it.
Mostly from systems you already have and from a structured look at the work with the team, not from a timesheet exercise. Where a short period of tracking is genuinely needed we scope it tightly and say what it is for, because a tracking programme nobody believes in produces numbers nobody believes.
Then that is the answer and the plan says so with the evidence behind it. The exercise is not built to talk you out of hiring. It is built so the number you take to a board is one you can defend when somebody asks how you arrived at it.
It is a fair worry and worth addressing directly before it starts. This work is normally commissioned because a team is overloaded, and the usual outcome is either a hire or the removal of work people already resent doing. We say that plainly to the people involved.
They answer different halves of the same question. This one tells you which pressure is a staffing problem and which is not. Where the answer is process, the process and workflow engagement is what absorbs it, and the two are often sequenced together.