Exhibit 13.6 Workload Chart for Sales Professional-Rep 2

Of all the resources you have in your professional services organization, the effective aggregate management of your billable resources will have the biggest impact on your profitability. Appropriately, our next step focuses primarily on how you manage this special group of resources.

Manage Your Aggregate Billable Resources

Your billable resources are the revenue generators in your professional services organization. When these resources are working for your client, they are generating positive cash flow into your organization. Your goal in this area is simple. Have the right number of people engaged in billable assignments at the maximum sustainable level of utilization for the longest period of time. The more people you have performing billable work for your clients, the more revenue you generate and, based on absorption of your overhead expenses, the more profitable you are as an organization.

Benched billable resources, on the other hand, have the opposite impact on your profitability. Many industries use the term benched or on the bench to refer to a potentially billable resource (professional staff) who is not engaged in doing work for a client for which the professional services firm is billing. Also referred to as downtime, this is a state dreaded by managers and consulting resources alike. When resources move out of a billable project and onto the bench, they cease to be revenue generating and become overhead

cost to the company. A short time on the bench can quickly erode a significant amount of gross margin. If, for instance, you pay a resource $75/hour, and when billable they generate a margin of $25/hour, then one hour on the bench will negate the effect of three hours of billability.

On the plus side, resources on the bench also represent an opportunity for the company to quickly fill a clients demand for service. Challenges often faced by professional services organization are:

Estimating the end of billable engagements properly to be able to anticipate when people might be coming to the bench

Determining the appropriate size for the bench resource pool to facilitate response to demand from new and existing clients

Finding optimal strategies for properly funding and maintaining the needed bench strength

To illustrate the challenges of managing the flow of billable resources to the bench as well as the need for some bench strength, well look at a few phases of a year in the life of a fictitious professional services organization. For this example, we focus on an IT software consulting organization residing within an IT consulting company that generates approximately $50 million dollars in revenue per year:

January: A large project run by 20 of your organizations billable resources comes to an abrupt and unexpected end and instantly increases your companys overhead costs. After carrying these resources on the bench for three months in hopes of closing another deal, you find partially billable work for two of them and decide to release the other 18 and pay them the appropriate severance based on industry practice.

May: A prospect who represents potentially the biggest client your company will ever have for the next decade calls to tell you that theyve decided to engage your company. The catch is that you must be up and running in 45 days. You currently have no one on the bench, and recruiters are telling you that it will take more than six weeks to find, secure, and orient the 50 people you need (the 18 people whom you released have moved on to other organizations). Four weeks into the process, the client becomes impatient because they dont see the progress they expected. (After all, they feel you are in this business and should be able to produce the people they need immediately and they did give you a generous 45 days.) They decide to give you only half the business and the other half to your competitor.

September: You start the new program with only 20 of the 25 people you hired for the program because your new client decided to down-scale a bit more, and five of your new hires went to the bench. Youve

also started the project later than planned, so youve lost some of the projected revenue.

October: Not being able to find billable work for the five extra people you hired, you release them.

November: The client where you placed the two partially billable people tells you they want to increase to seven full time but gives you only two weeks to fill all the spots.

All of these activities represent the typical ebb and flow of resources faced by project-based professional services firms.

What Is the Cost to the Firm?

Cost factors impacting the firm in this example include:

The cost of the period during which the company carried the people on

the bench from the project that ended in January The cost of severance as well as the administrative costs associated

with preparing and executing the release of employees The opportunity loss from failing to land the entire assignment with the

new client

The cost of hiring people for the new client assignment

The revenue loss due to not being able to start the assignment on time

The cost of having five newly hired resources land on the bench

Taking just this example and multiplying it by the countless projects being managed by a professional services organization, you will see the necessity and huge potential for fine-tuning this process to achieve more profitability and competitive advantages.

Steps to Take to Fine-Tune Your Organization

There are four basic areas that must be closely monitored to manage aggregate billable resources more effectively:

1. Business pipeline

2. Work backlog

3. Current business portfolio of contracts

4. Bench strength requirements

In the reminder of this section, we examine each of these in more detail and offer suggestions and models for managing these key components more