Related Posts
Bowl Leader
More Posts
Is fishbowl only available on the US App Store?
How's it like at Anomaly?
Community Builder
Hi fishes! The hiring manager has asked me for salary expectations of B6 Data Analyst and my experience is 3.5 yrs with a CTC of 6.65. Considering I have to move to Bangalore l'm thinking of asking 13 or 14.. is it a big ask? If so, what do you think is a good ask? Please help. Thanks in advance :)
Natwest group
Bowl Leader
Negotiating with EY for M/SM Tech Consulting. I have 15 years experience, skills are in demand and my interviews went extremely well. 1. What are the salary ranges for M and SM in NYC. 2. I am told it is only going to be a M now, for my own benefit-no EY network means failure at selling. Whats the highest salary I can negotiate at M. Any other tips will be handy. I have "sold" (support on sales & new roles through relationships) plus I have solid delivery experience. I really want SM 😀😀😀 EY
Additional Posts in Partner One
New to Fishbowl?
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
Not quite sure what you’re asking, so I’m going to do some creative editing to your question. For context, I am a B4 partner.
Why do we care about margin and utilization? Because those are critical KPIs for measuring our business.
Do we worry whether people are eating hours and therefore negatively impacting those KPIs as well as becoming frustrated in the process, as you clearly are? Yes. We don’t like for anyone to eat hours; that’s revenue lost and people being unhappy. From a leadership and operations standpoint, it is not an acceptable practice.
Does it happen? Yes, because unfortunately people like to monkey around with the numbers to hide their mistakes and since we are services providers, our mistakes are not as easily discovered as a pile of sneakers missing their soles at a plant. But let’s be honest here - this is not just partners although they do set a tone for their teams to follow so the burden is on them, it it is miscommunication, lack of transparency and operational sloppiness at every single level.
So why does this happen and how can you prevent it?
1. Tone at the top and its enablement - you have to make it clear that it is not allowed but you also should monitor for it, call it out when it happens and when it is significant, it should have an impact to match it. I think all firms do very well on making it clear it’s not allowed. I also think most of us monitor for it; it is difficult to catch when it’s ongoing (meaning from the very start of the engagement) but relatively easy when you start seeing monkeying around at the end of the engagement and/or FY, so many times I get a call from Finance that something fishy seems to be happening. At the end of the day, I and the other folks running practices do as well, know who the culprits at Partner level are, so you have conversations, remember it for their rivals, and then any time they have a new deal you have to approve, you really focus on engagement economics to prevent it from happening again. None of this is public to you for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get addressed. That said, there is room for improvement in the calling it out and having an impact area, which leads me to #2.
2. Clear goals, expectations and impacts - we are pretty good at setting goals and expectations on what should happen but I think we could improve on being more clear around what happens when you don’t meet those. We also need to make sure all levels understand and take it seriously. For example, I’m confident that PWC has some sort of an operational effectiveness expectations for each level as I am confident that most people treat it as a checkbox and read it as, “Am I on budget?”. And even if the answer is no, do you self assess as not meeting expectations? Probably not. Why? Because there are reasons that led to that, it is not your fault. But that’s not the question, is it? So we all collectively oversimplify that metric, don’t interpret it correctly, don’t self-assess correctly because we don’t understand its importance and then seat here and wonder why people continue to eat hours, which leads me to #3.
3. Engagement economics and firm’s operations are not understood and executed well. Even some Partners don’t understand this and if you go below, it gets worse much quicker. I am continuously shocked at the lack of knowledge and operational discipline in this area and has huge negative impacts on us primarily in these 3 areas:
a. We don’t always budget and negotiate projects well because we are not thinking of operations but sales. So don’t always estimate appropriately and then don’t cushion where we should with the client and internally. We don’t model scenarios that could have an impact on our margin - things like changes in leverage model, promotions, rates. We don’t manage change orders as proactively as we should. It’s kind of like comparing mechanic vs car salesman; we need to do better at bridging that gap.
b. We are not always disciplined and proactive - again simple things like tracking budgets and evaluating impact of changes going forward. So many teams just treat this as check the box vs understanding the root cause and the impact it could have and doing so regularly, so we can proactively address any challenges vs waiting until the last minute. We have to get more disciplined.
c. We simply don’t understand the process. People don’t understand bill rates vs cost rates vs standard rates, leverage models, profit, margin, rate increases, fees incurred vs billed, write-offs, etc. We have to get better at enforcing that education and culturally making people understand its importance, so we don’t propagate these issues. Teams have to operationalize this in the field. Knowledge makes you stronger and helps you have more effective conversations.
4. Transparency - you have to provide transparency to your engagement leadership. Have conversations about your budget as an individual and as a team and with the client; do so proactively and manage those expectations. I am concerned this amount of hours to do this task is not reasonable because of XYZ. In order to meet the original budget, we would need for ABC to happen. And so on and so forth.
5. Personal accountability - report your hours accurately. Track your hours worked; even if you are under strict orders of only charging X; charge the reminder to an admin code. It gives us an opportunity to account for those and to ask questions. Account for all your time correctly whether it is leaving early or late, working on this client or that one, supporting internal initiatives, etc.
To sum it up, nobody wants hours to be eaten. I think a lot of this is cultural due to us treating operations not as important as sales and delivery. It is on all of us, every single level and person, to continue to work on this to eliminate this practice. You can help by getting yourself and your teams focused on points 3-5 especially.
Thank you! - newly promoted Senior
Thousands of hours, come on. How many of those 9-6 hours do you text, jump on social media, eat lunch, talk about things not work related?
EY takes eating hours very serious.
Example:
My project runs 2 years. 25 consultants. We are not allowed to book more than 8 hours per day.
I come at 7am, leave at 7pm, sometimes finish up stuff after dinner. Friday is on the light side, ok.
Deduct:
1h each day for personal breaks (lunch, coffee)
30min for texting hubby, social media etc
And that’s generous (my average lunch break is 15min, I usually have my coffee at my workplace).
That makes about 50work hours per week, 40 chargeable.
90 weeks (deducting vacation, Training etc...also generous) for 25 consultants makes about 22,5k hours.
So...yes. I guess we can talk about thousands easily
Why do we need utilization as a metric? Since it’s so divorced from the reality of how projects run, I don’t see the actual value of it as a true performance measure.
Surely a strategy consultant could come up with some good replacements.
It is our production units. We don’t make widgets, so I’m not sure what other measurements you could use at individual and group level that would measure our productivity and capacity.
Have any ideas?