How operating a consulting company changes when you’re over 500 people

Now that we have a big number of companies using Operating for their resource management, it feels like a good moment to reflect on what we’ve learned. One key thing we've noticed is that with growth, complexity creeps in. The good news is, it's till manageable!

More business units, more elaborate reporting needs

In a company of 500+ people, it’s important to see how different units are doing. There are management roles whose job it is to go fire-fight in areas of the business that need their attention. In order to put those efforts where they’re most acutely needed, you have to be able to have somewhat comparable KPIs from all the units. What we've seen is that it's often quite tough for companies to actually know what's going on in the different areas of the business. That's where we can help.

Cross-unit and cross-border staffing doesn’t get easier, but the potential is huge

Especially true for companies that have grown inorganically–not just with hiring but through acquisitions. You really can’t expect the staffing team to know everyone “out there”. Having the talent’s names, skills and availability information at your fingertips makes success possible. For many companies, the cross-border collaboration is a strategic choice, giving people more exciting work and cross-pollinating knowledge inside the company. You may have to incentivise this because it’s always more comfortable to pick the team from the people you already know well.

Tailoring the projects & people experience in Operating with pre-saved filters

If you have 3000+ people in your entire company, you really never go through the list of available people from A to Z. Hitting “clear” on the people filter panel shouldn’t give you the full list of people, but bring you back to the comfort of your home view instead. For BU leaders, that’s their unit, all roles, all skills. For a competence leader, most likely a combination of a Site (country, city) and a Role (e.g. developers). The saved filters functionality allows each user to craft the views that they need most often.

Keeping things simple is still a worthy goal

From a financial/HR standpoint, you must take care of cost centers, reporting structures, internal pricing, and all of the different flavors of hierarchy. In order to save the sales and staffing from unnecessary headaches, you should follow a basic setup in your organizational setup: Sites and Groups. It's as simple as possible but not any simpler than that. Also, it’s unwise to try to enter all of the details with 100% accuracy for each and every CRM deal–after all, you won’t win all of them. Nothing more, nothing less. Keep your process agile until it’s time to start tracking time and invoicing. That’s when you know all of the details and that’s when you must have them set.

Same applies for statuses: in Operating, work is either confirmed or tentative and active or archived. Tentative + archived means it never happened. Confirmed + archived is completed work, shown in all of the reports, but out of sight from people who are focused on what’s happening right now.

Operating aims for simplicity, although human nature seeks to engineer more and more complex solutions to problems when systems grow.

Master data in a well-integrated architecture

Operating sits in the middle: we take incoming deals from CRM, which has tons of customers that may not exist anywhere else in your systems. Happy to take them on board! We also pull things from your project master, typically an ERP of some sort. Our external id system is flexible and has worked well with dozens of different systems, pulling information from time tracking systems, HRIS, and even CV databases. You probably don’t want Operating to be the master of any of this information, and we respect that.

It’s been amazing to see how well our original approach–built for companies with roughly 100-200 people–has worked on a bigger scale. The performance improvements and data model changes we’re introducing during 2024 has made the app faster for everyone. Most of the complex stuff can be hidden if you’re just one unit, in one location. Who knows, maybe you will grow to be 10x bigger than today? Make sure your tooling can handle it.