About this illustrative case study
Northstar Advisory is a fictional consulting firm created to show how a typical KADO implementation can work. The company, people, and scenario below are illustrative; they are not presented as a real customer or verified customer results.
The situation reflects a common operating pattern in growing professional services businesses: resource plans spread across Excel files, project information maintained elsewhere, and managers making staffing decisions through messages and meetings. The purpose of this case study is to make the transition concrete without inventing a customer endorsement.
The starting point: a resource plan split across Excel files
Northstar had grown from a small partner-led team into a multi-practice consulting business. Each practice lead maintained an Excel staffing sheet. Project managers kept separate delivery plans, sales tracked likely engagements in the CRM, and employees recorded time in another system.
Every file was useful on its own, but no file showed the full picture. A consultant could appear available in one practice sheet while already committed to work owned by another team. Planned leave was sometimes added after staffing decisions, and pipeline work reached operations only when an engagement was close to signing.
- Different managers used different definitions of available capacity.
- Allocations were entered as a mix of percentages, days, and hours.
- The same consultant appeared in several workbooks with no shared total.
- Utilization reporting described the past but did not show future pressure.
- Staffing decisions were difficult to trace after email and chat discussions.
Why another spreadsheet did not solve the problem
The operations team first tried to build a master workbook. It standardized columns and brought the practice sheets together, but the underlying process remained fragmented. Someone still had to collect updates, resolve conflicting entries, and decide which version was current.
The workbook could calculate totals, but it could not own the workflow. A project manager still needed to request a role, a line manager still needed to recommend someone, and the selected consultant still needed the assignment reflected in their own view. Copying the final decision back into several files created another opportunity for drift.
Northstar concluded that the problem was not a missing formula. The business needed one operating model for people, projects, capacity, staffing decisions, time off, and actual effort.
The move to KADO
Northstar started with one consulting practice and a short planning horizon. The team imported its people, roles, skills, managers, active engagements, and current weekly allocations. Working patterns and approved leave established a more reliable capacity baseline.
The implementation preserved Excel as a source for the initial migration rather than trying to reproduce every workbook tab. Each field had to support a real decision: who is available, what work needs to be staffed, which skills are required, and who is accountable for the next step.
- Normalize people, roles, skills, and working capacity.
- Create active projects with dates, owners, and weekly effort.
- Separate confirmed assignments from probable pipeline demand.
- Record planned absence before calculating available hours.
- Define who requests, recommends, approves, and reviews staffing.
A weekly resource-planning workflow replaced file reconciliation
After the initial setup, the operating meeting changed. Managers no longer spent the first part of the meeting deciding which workbook was correct. They reviewed exceptions in KADO: people above capacity, consultants with available time, unfilled roles, likely pipeline gaps, and projects whose forecast had moved.
A new staffing need began as a resource request with the role, skills, proficiency, dates, and weekly hours attached. Line managers could recommend suitable people with their availability in view, while the project manager retained the final staffing decision. The approved assignment then became part of the shared capacity plan.
Employees could see their own upcoming project effort and record actual time against assigned work. That kept the forecast and the record of delivery connected without treating planned hours as timesheet instructions.
What changed for the business
The most useful change was shared context. Operations could see capacity across practices, project managers could understand the impact of a staffing request, and line managers could protect their teams from conflicting commitments. Leadership could discuss likely demand alongside the people required to deliver it.
The firm still exported data when a spreadsheet was convenient for analysis or presentation. Excel became an output and migration tool rather than the place where competing versions of the resource plan were maintained.
Because this is an illustrative scenario, these outcomes are qualitative rather than customer performance claims. A real implementation should establish its own baseline and measure planning effort, time to fill requests, forecast accuracy, utilization, overload, and project margin over time.
- One weekly source for capacity and assignments.
- Earlier visibility into role and skill shortages.
- Clear ownership of staffing recommendations and approvals.
- A direct connection between forecasts and actual effort.
- Less time spent reconciling versions before making a decision.
A practical path away from Excel resource planning
A services business does not need to migrate every historical spreadsheet before it can improve planning. Start with the team, projects, and decisions that matter in the next several weeks. Define one capacity method, make confirmed and probable demand distinct, and give each staffing action an owner.
KADO is designed to support that operating rhythm with connected people, project, capacity, request, time, and utilization data. Teams can begin with the workflow causing the most friction and expand the model as the shared plan becomes part of how the business runs.
- Choose one team and one planning horizon.
- Import only the fields needed for real staffing decisions.
- Run a weekly exception-based capacity review.
- Measure the process before and after the transition.
- Retire duplicate workbooks once the shared plan is trusted.