After working at a few consultancies from 2011 to the better half of 2017, I realized something astonishing. Many professsional service firms, despite being people-focused, had a terrible system for tracking their people!

While at Huron Consulting and Berkekey Research Group, I realized that tons of time and resources were spent on resource management, through manual efforts like excel sheets where each staff member would jot down their availability. At Huron we used a resource management system called Retain, which allowed each staff member to project hours on their long-term assignments. It then constructed a large gantt chart to visualize pockets of capacity 2-6 months out. Cool, but not exactly helpful day to day…

At Berkeley, there was a desire to track shorter-term availability of staff to handle “just-in-time” requests for people’s time. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the work, immediate requests from clients and law firms often left consultants over-extended or with nothing to do. While i was there I built a small desktop tool to help staff put their hands up and broadcast their availability. The goal was to smooth out our resource constraints, by shifting hours from employee to employee so that no one was working 14 hour days. Eventually, this became a standard way to track and request people’s time. We built the ability to add skills and in some respects, it became a two-way market for consultants looking to get staffed and project coordinators looking to staff.

I left Berkeley in Dec 2016 with no real aims to build anything related to this. I spent the year consulting on various projects in the healthcare analytics space, slowly moving to other industries of interest using my software and analytics background but I continued to have this nagging desire to build a SAAS product. I had the skills to get an MVP in place. What to build was still on my mind. During this year, I was already working on another project, WorkDive, which allows freelancers and small businesses to track their time via SMS, but I realized that marketing and building a B2C business was HARD. And there were a ton of competitors, so I just continued to use it as my own home-grown time-keeping system - still use it to this day.

I still had an itch to build a second-related product - you guessed it! Staff Mapper was meant to address some of the resourcing issues i ran into at Huron and Berkeley, but i wanted to build the proof of concept and of course, only sell to businesses this time. This made sense, since most of my contacts were in consulting, so I knew where my customers lived.

After speaking with some potential customers, mostly friends in the consulting space, they almost all universally claimed to have a need, but i was sensing a little pushback. More on that in another update…

So I put pen to paper and with some very brief market research, product development began in earnest in July of 2017 (per my first Github commit :).

I didn’t realize I’d still be working on it today…

I’ll be writing more about this in a 3-part series. Sign up to get the updates.