Operating Product Walkthrough: The Horizon
Operating helps agencies plan upcoming work, allocate people to projects, and monitor planned capacity and actual hours. This post is specifically about a feature called The Horizon. The Horizon lets agencies organize and plan upcoming work and build teams with the right competencies and skills. Read further to know more!
As you can see from the image above, Horizon lists all your projects in connection to your CRM, allowing you to enrich them with data relevant for staffing purposes. While a CRM is primarily for logging sales-related activities, Horizon is designed to help you understand the people and role needs in upcoming projects. At a glance, you can see open roles divided by competence. Each row represents a staffing need yet to be confirmed. The pipeline stages are replicated from your CRM, with the most urgent ones at the top. You can also mark an estimated start date to further refine the data and input preliminary skill needs, helping you make sense of which types of skills are in demand in your sales pipeline.
TIP: You can use Horizon to run your sales and staffing weeklies efficiently. Horizon's interface works nicely for going through all open staffing needs and discussing whether any case needs special attention.
Once you connect your CRM or add a new tentative project manually, you can outline the initial team setup. In this example, the demo company is pitching a mobile app project to Walmart, so it's likely that a developer and designer will be needed. Perhaps this has already been discussed with the client! Marking initial team setups is an excellent way to communicate open needs. If Horizon is accessible to your entire company, both consultants and management can browse open needs. Perhaps someone has an idea of who could be a great fit for a particular project.
When the project progresses further in the pipeline, it's time to schedule the work, assign it to someone, and manage workloads. When you're ready, you can click 'Schedule on Timeline' to do this, and you'll be directed to the staffing timeline.
Summary
Horizon is your agency's situation room for all open roles and positions at your clients and prospects. Use it to organize your staffing and resource management efforts and run your sales and resource management weeklies. This is the go-to place for both sales and resource managers to keep track of upcoming needs in projects. Used right, it gives everyone in your company a glimpse into what's happening in sales - and most importantly, not just the numbers, but what kinds of people needs there are at your clients!
