Flok Consulting

Flok Consulting is a Salesforce consulting company that works with clients to implement Salesforce, customize it, and optimize their user experience. Director of Delivery Julia Cannon focuses on making sure her team has the right processes and tools in place to deliver on those services effectively for each client. 

As part of role, Julia is naturally juggling a lot of responsibilities. She needs to allocate resources effectively, keep a health check of ongoing projects, maintain a solid utilization rate, plan for future projects, and recognize when it’s time to hire — to name a few. 

Doing all of these at once can be tricky without the right tools in place. In order for her to accomplish all of the above, it’s critical that Julia has up-to-date insights on team availability and utilization, budget projections vs actuals, and a way to know when it’s time to recruit new talent.

Luckily, Flok Consulting uses the power of Forecast and Harvest to bring clarity to the project planning process and ensure each client receives the best service and end result possible. 

According to Julia, Forecast is “always open” on her browser.

Resource allocation insights 

Julia and her team use the Forecast and Harvest integration to not only track resource utilization for each project, but to understand what kind of resources future plans will need. 

“We use it to forecast what we think our resources are going to be utilized for on the various projects from week to week,” Julia says. “We also really like the integration where you can go to the Harvest side of things and see budget projections based on what’s in Forecast. That’s really important to us and our ability to track the health of a project. It helps us project not just current projects, but future projects as well.”

With this detailed understanding of the project health, Julia and her team are better able to know when they may have to have a conversation with their client about the status of their budgets.   

Monthly exports for better analysis 

Another primary function Forecast and Harvest provide for Flok Consulting is the ability to generate monthly reports to help them make smarter planning decisions in the future.

“Once a month, we export what our forecasted allocations were for the prior month, so we can compare it against the data in Harvest to what people actually logged,” Julia says. “That way we can do an estimated vs. actual analysis of where people’s time was spent.” 

Utilization insights

The unique visibility into utilization rates for each team member is critical for Julia to not only see if they need to hire for a certain role. 

“We can very quickly see if anyone is underutilized, if anyone is overutilized,” she says. “We can see across the board if we're getting to a point where we need to go hire somebody. So we use it in projecting our hiring and how we need to grow the team in order to support our incoming projects.” 

And by being a little proactive in the system, Julia’s also able to see what utilization would look  like if they were to take on more projects. 

“We also use it for projects we're pursuing that we haven't actually won yet. We'll go ahead and put them in with a different indicator so that we know that it's not a signed project, and we can use that to help us see what it would look like if we put this person on this project for how much — what is that going make their utilization look like in two months?”

Doing so makes the planning process much easier and helps Julia understand how an increase in projects would impact the team to prevent burnout.

By using Forecast with Harvest, Julia and Flok Consulting are much better prepared to keep a health check on current projects, track resource allocation, plan for future projects, and know when it’s time to take on new team members — making it much easier to keep their clients (and employees) happy.