professionals from having to spend precious time on nonbillable office management issues. Additionally, the office managers goal is to provide services that make the job easier, or to facilitate doing components the job using a less expensive resource (i.e., graphics specialist, research analyst, typist).

This chapter provides an overview of the office management function. We discuss the typical support services provided, facility management best practices, and the hiring of office managers.

What Is Office Management?

Office management consists of three primary functions. First, office managers typically provide support services to the rest of the employees. These services include administrative support, scheduling, print and document reproduction services, design/graphics support, telecom, mail, and so on. Second, the office manager maintains the physical facility and manages the landlord and building services. Maintaining the facility encompasses space planning, maintenance, office moves, security, storage, vending and coffee service, break rooms, and so on. Finally, the office manager in some cases may be responsible for other duties such as coordinating local office social activities, celebrating major firm events, publishing firm newsletters, maintaining a history of the firm, and providing meeting space outside the building, to name just a few of the other miscellaneous duties.

Support Services

Support services are those common services that can be leveraged across all the staff. They are typically items that can be centralized relatively easily and they use standard processes to control scheduling and quality.

Support services are also activities that need to be routinely performed to support the professional staff in the normal course of their work (e.g., document duplication and filing). Support services sometimes require the acquisition of capital equipment (e.g., copying machines, graphics workstations, postal equipment). Plotters, high-end printing, paralegal services are just a few examples of support services.

When deciding which activities to support at a centralized office level, consider those which:

Are required by all staff.

Exhibit economies of scale.

Can be effectively executed by lower-cost administrative staff than by professional staff.

Are experiencing labor pool scarcity.

In most cases, any service that is required by all staff should be supported if not managed centrally. If most client work requires some kind of graphics production for reports, in most cases, it will be appropriate to have a graphics production group managed centrally. This ensures a unified look to graphics and that best practices can be easily adopted and adhered to, as well as achievement of scale economies in production. If this function is not centralized, then each professional staff group or project team would need to hire their own graphics production resource wasting valuable time and increasing costs.

Support services typically have some economies of scale, for example, copy machines. You wouldnt want each principal in the firm purchasing his own copy machine (with the resulting disparity of machine types, speeds, service plans, etc.). The benefits of centralizing purchasing and management where there are economies of scale is well-explored territory. Obviously, by grouping the purchase better pricing can be negotiated and volume discounts will apply lowering overall purchasing costs. Additionally, the expensive equipment can be located optimally so that appropriate staff can access and use it easily. Finally, this keeps your expensive professional staff billing clients for services, and not negotiating equipment leases.

Support activities also experience economies of scale in labor. For example, rather than hiring three half-time personnel to do estimating, you can centralize the function and do the same amount of work with one fulltime person thus saving the fractional utilization of a half person. These activities are labor intensive and the firm can reduce costs by managing a centralized highly leveragable unit. These services include postal mail management, graphic production, paralegal services, administrative services, and so on.

Finally, you need to consider availability (or scarcity) of resources when analyzing centralization. For example, if most professional staff need a small but critical function for each client engagement, for example a project financial controller, and the labor pool for this function is small, the firm will be better off hiring one full-time equivalent and leveraging that resource across the business rather than having each principal try to procure the resource individually. Decentralization in this case would lead to low utilization of a fulltime resource or the procurement of many high-cost part-time contractors neither of which is desirable. If each client proposal or project needs some specialized research for a short period of time, the firm is likely to create a centralized support group that provides research rather than having each principal hire their own research associate.

The most common support services include:

Administrative staff management Document reproduction

Travel booking and trip management Mail rooms

Record keeping and document management

Administrative Staff Management

It is almost always more efficient to centrally manage the administrative staff. The job function of the entire administrative staff is usually similar, the pool of staff can share responsibilities, they typically have standard duties, and they keep the professionals billable and efficient. Professionals are notoriously poor managers of administrative staff, and will benefit from the improved attention to administrative staff management, careers and development accompanying a centralized management approach.

Developing standard administrative roles across the company is a best practice. The office manager can do this relatively easily. First, define the work requirements of each type of administrative staff. Next figure out the duties needed to support each level of professional staff and the required hours per week needed to support each professional staff type. For example, an associate may only receive filing and travel support thus requiring only four hours a week. A senior associate may require calendar scheduling assistance and expense management assistance thus requiring about eight hours a week of an assistant. A principal requires all of the above plus dictation, presentation support, marketing campaign support, and so on, thereby consuming at least 20 hours per week. Given this load, a single assistant could handle only one principal, two senior associates, and one associate. Alternatively an assistant could handle one principal, one senior associate, and three associates. The ratio that works for a given will depend on the specific type of work, number of professional staff and administrative burden for each.

Typically junior professional staff only receive basic administrative services (mail delivery, photocopying), while senior staff receive the full suite of services from the administrative team.

Document Reproduction

Document reproduction, copier centers, and scanning stations are provided through similar products and service models, and are well suited for central office management. Some firms charge out these services while others factor the cost into their services. Regardless, the most critical aspect of running one of these services is the process for requests, the turnaround time, the delivery of finished product, and billing for the services. Most firms will determine that the tradeoff of a $10 to $20 per hour resource doing this work is well worth saving the high cost of a professional doing the same.