Forecasting as a Team Sport with Parallax CEO Tom O’Neil

Boom or bust, feast or famine. Growing agencies all experience the project-capacity rollercoaster – probably more often than they would like. As projects ramp up or down and team capacity grows or shrinks, tasks get triaged on a day-to-day or, if you’re in good shape, week-to-week basis. With so many variables, the thought of projecting capacity appears daunting. But how do you handle a flood of new work or scale back in a drought, without compromising profitability?  
It’s a common problem, one that Tom O’Neil experienced first-hand while building a consulting firm over the course of 14 years, “from just a handful of nerds to over 500,” and about 85 million in annual sales, he discussed in a recent podcast interview .  
His goal in founding Parallax – a resourcing or forecasting tool – was to build the tool he wishes he had had during his time as a CEO of a digital agency: “It always felt like we had too much work and not enough people or not enough work and too many people,” he says. “That roller coaster could flip on a weekly basis.”
After getting into the weeds with 40 different agencies and consultancies to find out how they handle this unparalleled challenge, Tom sees the secret to capacity forecasting. “You need to solve the problem from the right seat.”  
While companies traditionally centralize forecasting and resourcing, having a single point of responsibility who needs to pull data from disparate systems, combine it, massage it, interview people about the current state of projects in the pipeline is very ad hoc, and not very repeatable.  
Instead, Tom says, it’s best to take advantage of the expertise of people who are much closer to the business, whether they're project managers or team leads. What if, instead of having a ‘forecasting’ person interrogate them, they could be proactive?  
To make that shift requires one major thing: The frontline team member needs that wider angle view of a CFO or a CEO who thinks about a project in the greater picture of the company. If you can teach a project manager to think like an operator, you’re that much closer to producing a forward-thinking forecast that provides actionable insights.