Blog · Territory, capacity and quota planning · Consulting and advisory
How a consulting or advisory firm reconciles its sales pipeline to delivery capacity by practice and by month: sold and weighted-pipeline hours against available hours from the roster, the months where sold work exceeds the bench and the months where the bench exceeds sold work, and why the two failures need opposite responses from the same report.
A consulting firm's sales team sells; its resourcing team staffs. The pipeline and the roster live in different systems and meet in a hallway conversation in the month the work starts. The two exports, joined by practice and month, show the collision three months earlier. This guide sets out demand in hours from the pipeline, supply in hours from the roster, and the gap per practice per month.
Per practice, per month:
Demand hours = sold hours + Σ pipeline hours × stage probability Supply hours = headcount × billable target − leave − hours already assigned Gap = demand − supply
In fees:
Gap in fees = gap hours × the practice's average realised rate
Opportunity and person identifiers only.
Σ practices' supply hours = firm supply hours every person is in one home practice
A person in two practices, or none, fails it and is listed.
One practice, next four months, hours.
| Month | Sold | Weighted pipeline | Demand | Supply | Gap | In fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct | 4,100 | 900 | 5,000 | 4,600 | +400 | $84,000 short |
| Nov | 3,800 | 1,600 | 5,400 | 4,500 | +900 | $190,000 short |
| Dec | 2,200 | 1,400 | 3,600 | 3,900 | −300 | $63,000 bench |
| Jan | 1,100 | 1,900 | 3,000 | 4,700 | −1,700 | $360,000 bench |
November is short by nine hundred hours, and it is the pipeline's weighted hours that make it so; if two of those deals close, the shortage is real and hiring takes longer than six weeks. January has seventeen hundred hours of bench, and the response is selling into January now, which the sales team would not know without this page.
| Gap sign | Reading | Owner | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Positive | Demand exceeds bench | Practice lead, resourcing | Hire, subcontract, borrow from a neighbour, or delay a start |
| Negative | Bench exceeds demand | Practice lead, sales | Sell into the month; move people to a short practice |
Pipeline in fees, roster in people. They cannot be compared. Convert both to hours.
Unweighted pipeline. Every practice is short every month. Weight by stage.
Leave ignored. December's supply is a third lower than headcount says.
Cross-practice availability not shown. One practice hires while its neighbour benches.
Mapped once, the pipeline, the sold engagements and the roster produce demand, supply and the gap per practice per month, with the cross-practice line. Covirage builds this from the exports as they are. The professional services page describes the setup, and the ramp and attrition guide covers the supply side when hiring is the answer.
The proposal or the engagement plan carries hours by role and month for sold work. For pipeline, the proposal's estimate where one exists, or the practice's median hours per dollar of fee for that engagement type, stated as such.
Headcount by practice and grade, times a billable-hours target per month, less booked leave and less hours already assigned to sold work. The billable target is the firm's own, stated, and the same across practices unless the practice's target differs.
Assign each person a home practice and a stated share available to others. The report shows cross-practice hours as a separate line so that a practice's shortfall can be covered from a neighbour's surplus before anyone hires.