How staffing for volatile demand was solved for a large entertainment management firm.  

This client received not just a strategic workforce planning report, but also a custom-built scenario modelling tool that helped them to reliably predict resourcing costs and lead times whenever they were asked to manage new venues.  

The Challenge:

Managing entertainment venues requires passionate, experienced staff who live for the adrenaline of seeing everything properly prepared before the curtain rises. You can't just find these staff anywhere, so imagine the workforce planning challenges of a company that has to take on new major events and venues at short notice, whilst still being responsible for multiple weekly venue transitions at multiple existing venues. Several times a year, a new venue would unexpectedly come on the radar, and our client was required to provide a same day response to two key questions:

• "When can we start running events in this new venue?"; and

• "What will be the annual cost of managing up to 100 annual events of different types at the new venue?".

Under-estimating the answers to either of these questions would result in our client suffering legal and financial damage.  Over-estimating would result in reputational damage in a this tight-knit industry where everyone knows everyone.

Our Approach:

• Management first requested that our experts design the roles and structure of their future workforce. This comprehensive workforce planning exercise included:

  • alignment with organisational strategy;

  • analysis of industry-wide supply and demand for talent;

  • designing an attraction and retention strategy; and

  • consultation with all levels of management up to the Board.

• Using the agreed future staffing structure and roles, our experts then started building our model to estimate the client's demand for talent in various scenarios. Our model made it easy for the client to enter details of proposed new venues and events, view the estimated workforce requirements and identify any inconsistencies.

• Our experts offered ongoing support for the model, but this was not necessary because it was handed over to the client with comprehensive documentation and video “how to’s” so they could maintain it themselves.

The Results:

• Stakeholder buy-in: The proposed workforce plan was described as a "win-win" by staff, management and the Board, as it addressed a number of their shared frustrations with the previous staffing structures, provided opportunities for staff development and allowed for efficient scaling of operations.

• Improved accuracy in estimating resource requirements for new venues: Variance between estimated vs actual resourcing cost reduced by 52%.

• Faster estimations of resource requirements for new venues: improved from 3 weeks to same-day.

Key Takeaways

When to Consider This Approach

• If you want not just a one-off workforce planning exercise, but also a workforce estimating tool that can respond to future scenarios.

• If your business has yet to consider the resourcing impacts of major changes such as Ai or the Brisbane Olympics.

• If your business is required to estimate lead times and costings for major contracts at short notice.

• If your business needs scenario modelling that can evolve over time with new scenarios and fine-tuned assumptions.

Critical Success Factors

• Use best-practice data modelling techniques under the hood, but focus on user experience for updating scenarios and interpreting the estimates.

• If timelines don’t permit the performance of formal time and motion studies, start with task estimates from the people doing each task, and then make sure your modelling tool allows you to validate and fine tune those task estimates over time.

• Our experts ran a change management and communications exercise as part of this project to ensure that the intentions of the project were not misunderstood. The exercise revealed that some staff were worried about their employment security. However, management were quickly address these concerns by explaining that the project was about taking on more venues, not reducing staff.

• Make a support plan for the model. In this case, our experts built the model using Microsoft Excel, Power-Query and Power-Pivot, because client staff were familiar with those applications.  

Timeline & Investment

For this large, complex client with over 500 staff and over 10,000 branches in their work breakdown structure, the fee was approximately:

• $50k for the workforce planning consultation and report; and

• $80k for the workforce estimating model.

Our fee would be significantly less for a smaller, simpler business.

Next Steps

Attraction and retention of talent has been challenging since Covid, but it’s important to also consider whether the workforce you’re working so hard to attract and retain will continue to be competitive over the next 5 years. Workforce planning and estimating can help your business to remain competitive - an important factor in attracting top talent to your winning team.  

Schedule a consultation to discuss:

• How these approaches might apply to your specific situation

• Preliminary assessment of potential impact

• Customised project scope and approach

About the Consultant: Alastair Cranswick has 20 years of industry experience in top tier consultancies and as an in-house executive. He believes that two clients in the same industry can differ as much as two clients in different industries, and the keys to finding actionable insights are curiosity and empathy. Therefore, he has specialised in transferrable skills such as:

• Research on industry trends and best practices;

• Scenario modelling using data science; and

• Actively listening to client officers at all levels from the front line to the board.

Schedule a consultation with Alastair

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