Episode 104 Transcript

Banoo Behboodi: Welcome everyone to the Pursuit Power Half Hour. I'm Banoo, and I'm so glad you're here for session two of our new series.

This is all about helping you sharpen your edge in professional services with practical, no-fluff strategies you can use to tackle the big challenges you face daily. I'm excited to be joined by Julie Grove today. She is the Senior Manager of Resource Management at Anthology.

Julie brings incredible insight and contagious passion for all things resourcing. We'll walk through her blueprint for building a centralized yet flexible model that scales sustainably.

You'll hear how to align teams around a shared operating model, track the right signals to prevent burnout, and balance global structure with local needs without slowing down delivery. This is a challenge many are working through within professional services. Professional services delivery often involves finding ways to centralize resource management without compromising local needs.

If that's the challenge you're facing, this is the session for you. I'm excited for this conversation. Welcome, Julie.

Julie Grove: Thank you. I really appreciate you inviting me to be here. I'm very excited about it.

Banoo Behboodi: Yeah, so am I. Let's start with introductions. I think it's important for the listeners to know more about you. If you can give us some background around your professional development, where you've been professionally, and your job at Anthology, that would be great.

Julie Grove: Sure. Absolutely. I have been very fortunate to have a long, wonderful professional services career over the past 30 years. I have been in K-12 education, higher education as a director of admissions at a college, and also working in big tech and then ed tech. I have loved it and am really enjoying it.

Specifically, the last ten years I have worked in resource management, which is my passion. My first experience, starting ten years ago, was helping an already established RMO that had been around for many years have a restart, optimize their processes, and create a stronger, more collaborative governance. That was my first experience when I was invited to join a company to start an RMO for them from scratch.

As of late, I have been most recently working with a decentralized RMO to make it centralized. I love the challenges and embrace all of it. I just love to share how strategic and the value that RMOs bring to every organization. I have really looked forward to this discussion. Thanks for inviting me.

Banoo Behboodi: Of course. I'm going to start with you threw out centralization and you've been busy centralizing where you are today. I can tell you that it becomes a challenge with most prospects that we're working with to implement Kantata with because they're going with one technical solution. The typical conversation is, where are you at? How ready are you to centralize and standardize your processes? Just in talking to you, you have a great concept of centralization doesn't necessarily have to lead to rigid standardization and end up creating friction.

To focus on that topic, how can leaders assess when their teams are truly ready for centralization? What strategies help evolve shared systems without alienating local autonomy, because each region and each business unit has their anomalies?

Julie Grove: It’s so important. What I would say to anybody that is putting together a centralized model, first and foremost, is that transformation begins with trust. When you're asking teams to change how they operate, especially in a shift toward centralization, what truly drives sustainability and change is building strong relationships with everybody first. Find out where they're at in the process. Are they open to it? We don't want to intimidate with pressure; people don't respond to that. They respond to partnership.

This means that as an RMO, we need to lean in and understand before we start advising. By meeting teams where they are, identifying their process gaps, and collaborating on solutions, the RMO can step in as a centralized leader for all the teams and create mutual respect and shared purpose together.

The importance of conducting a resource management maturity assessment across the business is also critical. This will determine what is needed and gauge the temperature for optimization first. What's good for one team at a certain time might be poor timing for another. Each organization, and specifically the teams that the RMO supports, will all do business differently. Centralization doesn't mean "same." The RMO will help shepherd and evolve the centralization together.

I can give you a real quick example. I've worked with a lot of different teams, and some of them have said, We're so thankful that the RMO is here. We understand the support they're going to provide us. We need it. We appreciate the vision, the strategy. I've worked with other teams that have said, resource management is going to add another layer to me, and I'm just not ready for that.

I understand that apprehension. I always welcome the different perspectives that teams have, and you have to find a common ground. I love talking with the skeptics; in most cases, it's because they've had a bad experience before. Once they realize that we're all working together for the same outcomes, we can engage centrally and have a unified purpose together. I think that's how we can make it really positive.

Banoo Behboodi: You mentioned maturity model. I know I'm familiar with the RMI maturity model. Is that the one you've used in the past, or do you have others you use?

Julie Grove: 100%. That's the model that I've used every single time. I’m a very big advocate of the RMI. I attend their global symposiums every year. I love the data they provide; they have a lot of surveys they send out and many people globally that affect the information they are sending out to all of us. It's valuable and really worth it. That's the maturity assessment that I always abide by.

Banoo Behboodi: Yeah, and a must, I would say for anyone in the RM role is to consider RMI membership and the information they provide. Enough on that. I know you talked about steps to go through and specifically there are five core elements that you associate to a centralized yet agile RMO. How can these be embedded into day-to-day workflows and decision-making roles? How do we walk through these five elements to lead to that centralization effort?

Julie Grove: Sure. I will just share that over my ten years within resource management, and prior to that I was a consultant. I worked hand in hand with a resource manager. I am very familiar with the processes. I will tell you that these five pillars that I feel are very important to RMO centralization excellence have been tried and true over many years.

It really starts with step number one, which I alluded to before: building trust and respect with the teams that you work with. You want to foster credibility as an RMO, be transparent, be consistent, and form that partnership. You want to be reliable. You want to be an advocate for them and for both the business and also the well-being of resources.

With that, the next step would be the assessment. You would conduct a maturity assessment across the business. This will identify the needs, readiness for optimization, and recognize the timing in the priorities. These insights will help tailor, support, and scale at the right pace.

With that, you're going to form your governance. Have it be inclusive and visible. Develop a governance that integrates people, systems, and processes. This ensures a safe space for the teams. They will feel supported in a collaborative, helpful environment.

I also want to mention we don't want to forget about raising awareness about the RMO. Some companies are just not that familiar with a Resource Management Office or operation. It's critical at that point, when you're putting together governance, that you let people know we're here and we're an advocate for you.

I always recommend, and I am very involved in new employee onboarding. I want to meet people. I ask them, have you worked with an RMO before? A lot of people say, I haven’t. They ask, are you part of HR? Are you part of talent? I always say we work directly with them, but we aren't part of their operation. We're here to support you. I encourage everyone to do the same. Also, create a feedback loop, because we are customer-facing in the RMO, not resource-facing. Having a feedback loop in place allows for communication and continuous improvement. That's an important middle step—step number three.

After that, you'll be able to have a measurement and monitoring framework in place. This will be important for leaders; they're going to want readouts and data. Implement dashboards, KPIs, metrics, and regular reporting—all of which are essential. This will assist teams in making smarter decisions and working centrally with the RMO by focusing on outcomes, not feelings.

Lastly, operational standardization requires a comprehensive tool for consistency, reliability, agility, and accuracy. In resource management, being agile and extremely accurate is essential. A tool enables this, allowing for a strong focus on forecasting, capacity, availability, and balancing resources before burnout occurs. It is critical to mitigate risk and support sustainability to demonstrate that the RMO is a trusted advisor.

I always add one last note here in this final process: the RMO serves all of our resources. That is what we are—we're their advocates. Please don't forget to be the advocate for your resource management team. The RMO needs to have awareness at the strategic level for leaders to understand what value the RMO is bringing to the overall operation. It is critical that resource managers have a path for growth and a roadmap so they can advance in their careers as well. I think that's probably a whole other topic that we can have another session on. I feel very passionate about growth for RMs.

Banoo Behboodi: I love the fact that if we walk through the five steps, there's so much that's laying the groundwork, and it's about the people, education, and making sure that you've set yourself up for success from a change management perspective. There's so much of what RM does that falls back on to people potentially, if they're not educated, feeling threatened, feeling that something they have controlled in the past is being taken away from them. The RMO function can be empowering and enabling, setting the stage to make sure that everyone understands that's the role you're going to play. I love that. I love the fact that you’re promoting that.

Julie Grove: We want to be a help, not a hindrance always.

Banoo Behboodi: Exactly. You referenced governance, and that's an interesting aspect. When you're dealing with the complexity of wanting to have governance at the global level, but then having all the variations at the local level at each BU level, how do you implement a governance system that accommodates, that’s flexible enough to accommodate the localities, but meets you at the global level?

Julie Grove: It's a lot, and it sounds like a lot. Honestly, I feel that an effective global governance can be both scalable and simple at the same time. It's really the collaboration and the interlock of people, systems, and processes.

The systems, of course, include your strong PSA tool—you have to have that. Your people and your processes, and all of those things are linked together. Organizations can have a design that's scalable for their governance by setting clear global principles while allowing the local teams some flexibility to adapt their processes to their particular context, like you said, to their BUs.

Empowerment really comes from trusting each other, having transparency, and giving the teams ownership, because they don't want to give up that ownership. Governance feels more like support and not a creation of a barrier or yet another operational hurdle. Sometimes we get that. Don't take that away from me. I want to have ownership over that. We want to mitigate any risk with the teams and make sure that they still have ownership over what they need. We're here to support them.

Banoo Behboodi: In the fifth step or element was around measurement. Anything that, if you want to create change, if you want to create improvements, you have to be able to measure. That was your fifth element. One of the typical measurements we look at is billable utilization. If you look at billable utilization alone as a metric, it can often hide dysfunction. There is so much that goes into what that scorecard looks like. That is going to allow leaders to detect burnout and bottlenecks before they escalate. How can they centralize governance but drive more proactive interventions and get their pulse on how their resources are doing?

Julie Grove: It's so critical to the business. I think you really need to start backwards. Whether you're having a refresh of your PSA tool, implementing a new PSA tool, or regardless of where you are in the process, it's important to know what information you are going to get out, what readouts you will be able to apply, and give information to leadership in the organization overall. I feel that a proactive approach to identifying red flags is critical. Collaboration with a variety of teams is also very important. You need to discuss the kind of readout and information needed for the metrics before you implement anything.

I'll give you an example. When we were implementing the Kantata Capabilities and Skills Management module, I had meetings for eight months beforehand with anybody and everybody that would talk to me. It's critical that you have support from leadership prior to implementing any part of your governance or any part of your centralization.

They're going to want to know what the details are, what's the data going to prove and show. Show me the data first that you plan on pulling out before you implement the tool. That will help close gaps, improve cost efficiency, enable smarter staffing decisions, and facilitate development plans. All of these factors are critical.

Some of the proactive tracking you can design includes forecasting versus actuals, sustained overutilization, and skill-to-work alignment. How many people do you have that know a particular practice? Are you one person deep? You'll have to skill up or get some people shadowing who have some bench time. Being able to see that information is critical, and taking a look at your billable versus productive time is important.

We want people to be able to scale up, take classes, and work on internal initiatives in the business, so we want them to get productive time toward their utilization. Having a clear view on billable versus productive time is necessary. A centralized RMO governance supported by these metrics, enabling escalations to be resolved efficiently and with outcomes that align across stakeholders, will help this piece be fulfilled.

Banoo Behboodi: You brought up skills, and it's a critical element of all of these. An effective RMO functioning is a proper skills database that is maintained. The last question I wanted to ask was to bring in some of your insights on the skills, if you can, on what are some of the best practices from your perspective of gathering skills, maintaining skills, a process around ensuring that those are accurate and feed into the decision making?

Julie Grove: Absolutely. I am very passionate about this part of the business. I feel that if you have this in place in collaboration with your HR or talent teams, and also in collaboration with resources and your BUs, you are going to be very successful. This brings capacity and capability into alignment, which is critical for the business.

When I first started out, I knew about eight months ago that we were going to go live and have this in one central repository. It was a no-brainer that we had to take everybody's spreadsheets, sticky notes, napkins where people had written down skills from their tribal knowledge, and put that somewhere. You need to organize first and have discussions with all of your teams and stakeholders to find out where everyone is with the skills. Where are you keeping them? Let's go for value over volume.

I will say that is critical and that's what we decided to do. We definitely wanted more quality than quantity in our skills databank. We've achieved that. We have maybe a hundred skills per BU, and many of them are practice agnostic so other teams can share each other's skills, especially when it comes to soft skills, which are critical throughout professional services.

We have accomplished this and also have useful reports that we are aware of for weekly, monthly, and quarterly readouts. Being organized ahead of time helps with implementing and being successful with the capabilities and the skills.

Banoo Behboodi: You talk about quality over quantity. That is something that is not always there, unfortunately. Was the path to get there to get everything out there by business unit and then start challenging in terms of the various capabilities that are there, highlighting how critical it was to them arriving at their business objectives?

Julie Grove: When I first met with each of the BUs separately, after they decided what they wanted to do, I then had a collaborative BU meeting, letting them hash it out so that they could talk to each other and say this isn't going to work. We need to do it this way. We need to make it simplified. They really helped to direct the most efficient way for tracking this information. By their collaboration, it helped to drive what we were going to do for the rollout of the initiative.

Banoo Behboodi: I love that. I know that you've spoken about Kantata, so it's no surprise that you are a Kantata customer. Before we close this out, I do want to give you the opportunity to share some of the capabilities that have helped you in this journey, as you've tried to centralize.

Julie Grove: Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to talk about it. Honestly, I am a big fan. I love the fact that in using Kantata SX, we have so much out of the box that we can use immediately, which is really focused on resource managers and overall resource management operations.

I've been with Kantata for just about a year and a half now, and I've been using the tool. It is user friendly and helps us to be successful in the daily processes we go through, and the support we provide to all the BUs, project managers in particular. The long-range plans we have with forecasting and our metrics long term have really been invaluable. I'm excited to talk about the three main tools we use every day in resource management and the three areas that we really live in.

Banoo Behboodi: Julie, this has been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you. I'm sure it's given everyone watching some powerful ideas to take back to their teams. Thank you to everyone for joining us today. I hope you've been able to get some tools and tricks that you can take back to your business to make even more effective resource management.

If you are curious about how Julie puts these strategies into action using Kantata specifically, please stick around. She is going to go into more detail about some of the key features she relies on daily to drive smarter resource management and keep her organization running at peak performance. Julie, with that, can you please share with us the three core features you use every day to improve your resource management?

Julie Grove: Absolutely. Every day we work in the resource schedule, the assignment search, and within engagements, the activity assignment that's in there as well. These are the three areas that are critical for what we do in the RMO every single day and also what managers do.

The first item that I mentioned, the resource schedule, is leveraged by people managers to access their direct reports. It shows actuals, what's scheduled for this week, and what's future forecasted a year in advance. That's amazing. Having that view and visibility on all of our projects that far in advance is wonderful for the business.

It provides quick visibility, showing people who are underutilized, people who are over for any upcoming PTO, any holidays, and other projects that they're working on. This is really helpful. RMs use this for capability matching. That's newer for us, but we're very excited about it because when PMs request a resource with a certain capability, it shows up there and we can do a nice search to find out who is a good option to fulfill that role that's being requested.

I'm going to pause on the second item here for just a second with the assignment search, and just go to the third one that I mentioned: engagement, the activity assignment. This is something that I've worked with project managers on quite a bit. I feel that this is a wonderful tool for them because project managers are used to being in their engagement all the time. They're used to working in their plan, their Plan Gantt, and they want to stay there.

They have the option to look at the activity assignment. It places all their resources on their project in one spot. They can view all the resources assigned to their project and see everything they're assigned to by clicking on a certain date. It's extremely user friendly. It will also show them if they're over in red. They can click that, wondering why they're red, since they aren't over in their project and don't have them scheduled that much time. A pop-up will show them the other projects they're working on and at the same time, they're over with everything they're assigned to.

This is extremely helpful for delivery teams and project management teams. It's a great communication tool. They can bring this up during a team meeting and review it together to discuss if someone can accommodate, if changes should be made, if something should be pushed out, or if the customer is ready. All kinds of those conversations can happen right there in their activity assignment.

The middle one I mentioned, the assignment search, is fantastic. It combines both the resource schedule with the plan in the Plan Gantt and brings them together. You are able to see that in one very useful, helpful area.

These are the three tools that we use every single day in the RMO. They are very helpful and help us be agile and accurate in the delivery that we provide to all of our centralized teams.

Banoo Behboodi: Julie, thank you so much for making the time and being with us today. You have provided us a great framework with specific tools that can be applied to effectively centralize resource management. We appreciate you also walking through in Kantata how you do that. It is extremely helpful.

If you're interested in getting more information about how Kantata can help you run a more flexible resource management office, please drop your name in the chat. We will be happy to get back to you with more information. Take care and hopefully we'll see you all again in our next session of the Pursuit Power Half Hour.

Brent Trimble: If you enjoyed this podcast, let us know by giving the show a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a comment. If you haven't already subscribed to the show, you could do so anywhere you get podcasts on any podcast app. To learn more about the power of Kantata’s purpose-built technology, go to kantata.com. Thanks again for listening.