Staffed, Staffed, and Staffed again

Well I have posted about this many times before, but the strangest part of my job is how we are staffed on projects. There is really no true way to make sense of it. Officially we have resource managers that are supposed to staff us. But most people end up getting staffed on their own by networking internally or working on sales projects. But either way it can take a while and there are many ups and downs to the process. Since I have been back from the UK I have been working to get a good longer term project. I have interviewed with project managers, clients, and teams for a variety of roles. Most of which I have been turned down for or the role was canceled due to project funding.

So it has been a bit of a roller coaster. Plus my current skill sets don’t match up with my positioning in the firm so it is hard to go after the roles I am supposed to go after and tend to get pulled into unrelated roles. The latest development is continues this trend. Though I think it is funny because it again shows the feast or famine nature of consulting. I has a nine week project that I knew was short term from Jan 19 to a couple weeks ago. So I never stopped trying to find a good project since I started the quest in December. Up until this week I wasn’t having much luck; too many people fighting over the same roles. But then what seems to always happens, occurred again. I went from having one project to three.

This of course doesn’t work out because I can only be in one place at a time. So the situation was kind of a mess, just as a similar situation had been a few years ago. You have three managers all trying to bring you on to their project. What made this time more amusing is that it was three possible roles on the same project but for different managers. My poor staffing manager didn’t know what was going on. But it was nice for me to have several people fighting for me. There are an awful lot of people that are on the bench not earning utilization and I am sure another round of layoffs is coming this summer and probably one after the holidays next year. So it is good to be working. I just wish the process made more sense, put people where they should be, and maybe had a little more equity.

However that said this role will be at least 6 months form me and it will probably go on for well over a year. So hopefully I won’t be facing the chopping block and this will get me through the recession. That would be nice. Even if I do have to take a connection each way to get to the client.