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For all of you saying 20% - how do you achieve that in the current environment? There are no seniors available to perform detailed review before manager. The seniors are drowning in their own work. It would be impossible to pile up more on their plates.
Only work when staffed properly. Also, sometimes removing senior review doesn’t hurt because some of my seniors don’t really catch what I would expect them to anyways.
Never eat time as a manager when performing the detailed work. This practice only makes time when your investing time to win work (eg assessing, building up proposal, etc). Do tell your partners when a job is about to take a beating from a staffing shortage (and you’re about to lay into the code to do the detailed work) vs if there’s potential additional billing items. Project margin is accounting fiction because your salaried to work less hours than you likely actually work. If there’s not enough junior staff to do detailed work, that’s the partner’s problem, not yours—and you should verbalize that to yourself to get comfy. Don’t eat time.
Partners can’t price recurring work effectively or identify areas for focused improvements if all the detailed work hours have been eaten
Do consider dropping your standard of what “passing” work is. You’re likely an insecure overachiever (same here) if you’ve made it to manager+. You’re likely pre-disposed to aiming for A quality work, when you can pragmatically focus on higher risk reporting areas.
@Director1 yes, there is a lot of variation because many reviewers leave preferential comments rather than actual technical comments… frustrating especially in this climate
Managers (and above) comprise no less than 20% of total budgeted hours and no more than 30%. If managers and above are at half the time, there’s a problem:
A) managers should not be performing a detailed review, except of procedures in response to significant risks. For Less than significant risks, a staff level in between preparer and manager should perform the detailed review.
B) if managers are performing procedures, they either poorly planned staffing model or the tasks to be performed (eg not enough budgeted for upfront discussion of purpose of procedure). These managers need to learn to delegate.
C) managers should only be stepping into work where significant items requiring summarization for the engagement leader and/or client leadership. Managers can perform intermediate reviews (ie in WIP) if they’re really running out of work and/or workstreams have not been providing routine status
D) managers should be assessing the progress of each workstream towards their own due dates and budgets. Re: budget and since audits are recurring, they should also be tracking initiatives to automate or offshore new work
Based on what you’ve shared, 50% manager makes sense. That being said, the amount of client fees you’ll need to ask for will either be unattractive (relative to competing bids) or result in an especially low margin % (which is really accounting fiction imo)
From my experience, you don’t need top notch seniors, just folks that can have a basic status request and questions with client contacts in the BAU function center (no execs). Set this expectation upfront.
Either work quality or margins will degrade until your jobs either sufficiently junior staffing / further outsourcing. Remember that there’s only limited time in a managers waking hours—-soooo imo, let work quality slip in the lower risk areas because y’all don’t get paid enough at the manager level
If you’re unwilling to let work quality slip, the only way is to maintain quality is to increase the work hours of junior staff in the off-season for planning and interim testing—best achieved if you can lock down testing items through manager review going into Q4
I use 20% as a guideline.
Basically, what the partners might want to believe is happening lol but it is not happening 9 times out of 10
How much direct/first review are managers doing? That higher percentage would make sense if it’s a smaller engagement where the staff (or senior) is doing original work and it’s getting a direct/first review by the manager
All of the work goes straight to manager. We're short on seniors and they don't have time to review.
Right now it’s a cluster and the lack of sufficient staffing is causing managers and senior managers to do way more detailed work than ever before. I’m lucky if I get a senior on any of my jobs these days…. So I’m still having to do a detailed review of EVERYTHING and actually step down and prepare work papers for critical sections in many cases. IDK if it’s happening like that everywhere, but at my firm.,, It’s a cluster and is definitely stifling my own development. The partners I work for don’t seem to care because the work is still getting done… they tend to only say something when the realization comes into question and they see how expensive this model is…. Unless of course, we managers are eating our time. 🥴
The partners are so used to being able to solve their problems by simply calling in the lawyers, lobbyists, HR departments, PR firms, etc., but the at some point there going to have do something substantive.
Yeah at our firm it's generally 50% of staff time.