In an agency, everything hinges on a delicate equation: delivering quality projects, on time, with available and committed teams.
But all too often, staffing is a source of constant tension. Resources mobilized on several missions, schedules adjusted in a hurry, conflicts detected too late… You spend more time putting out fires than calmly managing your business.
This reactive management style slows down performance and exhausts your teams. But there is another approach: integrate staffing and project management right from the quotation phase to anticipate needs, avoid conflicts and adjust resources flexibly.
How can you transform your staffing management to improve agility and profitability? What are the concrete levers to activate for smoother, more efficient planning? Here’s how.
Today's agency challenge
The bottom line: run-of-river staffing doesn't work
If you still manage your projects with a reactive approach, you’ve probably already faced these situations:
- You discover too late that an employee has already been assigned to another job.
- You’re forced to turn your schedules upside down in a hurry to distribute the workload.
- You lack visibility over your resources, which makes it difficult to take on new opportunities.
This fragmented management leads to a loss of agility, longer lead times and lower profitability.. The later the adjustments, the more costly they are, both in terms of time and energy for your teams.
Conversely, an early, fluid approach optimizes team allocation, reduces conflicts and improves project profitability.
Iterative and forward-looking staffing: the winning combination
The three pillars of good staffing
Effective staffing shouldn’t be a daily struggle, but a fluid, natural process. Yet too many agencies continue to manage their resources on a day-to-day basis, with no real anticipation.
The result? Overloaded teams on some projects, while others lack resources at critical moments.
The real challenge is to staff for the long term. By integrating staffing right from the quotation phase, and projecting resources over the entire duration of the project, you avoid permanent adjustments and gain in stability. This approach ensures that each employee knows in advance what he or she will be working on, and managers can better distribute the workload without last-minute stress.
The three pillars of high-performance staffing are clear:
- An iterative process
The schedule evolves naturally, according to project needs and team availability. - Long-term visibility
You can plan your resources well in advance, anticipating conflicts and avoiding periods of understaffing. - Smooth management
The schedule is 80% structured from the outset, reducing the mental workload and unforeseen adjustments.
With proactive planning and intelligent resource allocation, you can avoid imbalances and decisions made in a hurry.
Concrete benefits for your agency
Integrating staffing and project management enables you to transform the way you manage your resources. In concrete terms, this means :
- Time-saving – Less back and forth, less last-minute adjustments. You focus on the essentials.
- Fewer conflicts – Everything is set from the outset, reducing the tension caused by a lack of organization.
- Better visibility – You know exactly which resources are available, and when, which makes decision-making easier.
- Data-driven management and control of KPIs – When staffing and project management are well integrated, you can monitor the actual time spent on each projectin real time. and compare with the time originally planned. This analysis makes it possible to quickly identify discrepancies, adjust the workload and even be predictive: if a project regularly exceeds its time budget, you can detect it long before it becomes a problem.
- Controlled growth – You can take on more projects without the risk of overloading your staff, because you know exactly where you stand and can adjust your resources according to actual forecasts.
With this approach, every project is launched on a solid footing, with optimized resource management.
How to take action?
Structuring a clear workflow
Efficient staffing is based on a fluid organization, where each resource is assigned to a project according to its schedule, but also in line with the tasks to be carried out. All too often, employees know when they have to work, but not always on what. This disconnect between planning and execution leads to wasted time and last-minute adjustments.
The ideal solution is to adopt a system of tickets connected to the schedule. In concrete terms, this means :
- Each work slot is directly linked to a specific task.
- Employees know immediately what they need to do, depending on their availability.
- Project tracking is simplified, as each action is planned and attached to a resource.
With this approach, each employee has clear visibility: when a slot becomes available in their schedule, they know exactly which task to prioritize. Conversely, when an urgent task needs to be dealt with, it is automatically integrated into the schedule according to the available slots.
This eliminates downtime, optimizes the use of resources and ensures a smooth, frictionless sequence of tasks.
Why do agencies fail?
Many agencies are struggling to adopt this approach for several reasons:
- A lack of suitable tools – Staffing management is often based on spreadsheets or solutions that are too rigid, preventing agile, centralized planning.
- A culture of reactivity – The habit of managing emergencies rather than anticipating them leads to constant overloading of teams and last-minute adjustments that damage profitability.
- Separating project management and staffing – When the two are separated, resources are allocated without taking strategic priorities into account, generating scheduling conflicts and a lack of flexibility.
- Poor integration of the customer into the process – Too often, customers are informed of schedules once they have been set, which limits their ability to anticipate and generates late requests that disrupt the agency’s organization. By integrating the customer from the outset – by sharing a vision of allocated resources and key milestones – the agency improves communication, reduces unforeseen events and gains in efficiency.
An agency that removes these obstacles and adopts a more transparent, collaborative model will have the means to improve its performance while securing its commitments.
The case of SMASH Group
To illustrate this approach, let’s take the example of SMASH Group, a French consulting firm founded in 2018. In just four years, they have gone from 0 to 55 employees, with annual growth of 50%, recruiting an average of 22 people a year. This rapid expansion has highlighted the need to optimize time management and centralize tools to maintain customer service quality.
The challenges faced by SMASH Group :
- Limited visibility
With rapid growth, it was becoming difficult to monitor team workloads in real time, which could lead to overloads and increased stress. - Scattered tools
The use of Excel files for time tracking and administrative management lacked dynamism and didn’t provide an effective overview. - Inadequate planning
The absence of a centralized system made planning and anticipating human resources requirements complex.
Furious solutions:
- Real-time tracking
Thanks to Furious, SMASH has been able to precisely monitor the time spent on each project, anticipate recruitment needs and plan tasks optimally. Jean-Baptiste Cousin, co-founder of SMASH, says: “We monitor time thanks to Furious very precisely, firstly to make sure we’re not overloading teams and putting them under stress.” - Centralized tools
By adopting Furious, SMASH replaced its Excel files with a single platform, offering a clear view of staffing, planning and time spent per customer in just two clicks. - Improved planning
With an overview of schedules and automatic reminders for certain actions, the distribution of tasks and the anticipation of busy periods have been greatly improved.
The results have been significant: better visibility on projects, increased anticipation of staffing needs and reduced stress for teams. As Jean-Baptiste Cousin points out: “We’ve moved from the medieval to the digital era. With the arrival of Furious, we’ve moved into a much more dynamic era, with monitoring too, and obviously data security.”
Why is Furious the ideal tool?
Furious has been designed for agencies looking for smoother, more efficient management. In concrete terms, it allows you to :
- Planning right from the quotation phase – As soon as a project is validated, you know which resources will be mobilized and when.
- Detect conflicts well in advance – You can immediately identify potential overloads and resolve them before they become a problem.
- Save time with an ultra-intuitive interface – No complex settings, no cumbersome administration. Furious automates what needs to be automated.
- Benefit from 80% pre-built planning – All you have to do is adjust and fine-tune, rather than starting from scratch with each project.
With Furious, you give your agency a real competitive edge: the ability to deliver your projects smoothly, with complete peace of mind.
Want to see the impact for your agency? Book your free demo today.
