Best staffing model?
Currently an AN2 at a BB and have been consistently amazed by how outdated and under optimized staffing is at investment banks in general. In my own group and talking to friends it sounds like most people rely largely on weekly spreadsheets/word of mouth etc. Is that the case for others? Considering human capital is these banks' greatest asset, I'm shocked there's no better solution for all the wasted time, burnout, [insert other inefficiencies] plaguing junior work allocation.
For those of you who are or who have exceptional staffers, how do they pull this off? Do any groups use any software to help optimize/predict capacity? What sort of visibility do you guys have across the analyst class?
When I worked in private credit the internal pipeline-tracking software also came with a staffing module which was very helpful and visible to everyone.
Interesting - assuming it was developed in-house? If not, do you know the name of the software?
yeah it was called dealcloud
Best staffing model is PTO.
One issue with self-reporting anything is that unless someone is working like 40-50hours they will just inflate their work hours to stave off new staffings. At my old shop if you reported less than 80 hours you’re probably going to get staffed on some marketing book.
Guilty of this in the past. Thoughts on how to fix? Classic garbage in, garbage out
You’d have to go big brother and try measure every waking moment of activity on company owned devices which not only sounds unreasonable, likely to get a lot of false signals and false security based off those signals.
If not that there has to be some sort of group level incentive to be honest, I don’t know what that is though. I staffed in the past and one quick check I would do is compare the hours of people on the same deal team. If there’s any unreasonably wide variance, that’s one thing to interrogate
Yeah or I imagine you could weight the hour inputs by people who are staffed on many projects more heavily than those of people staffed on only a couple things. The former should be more likely to be an accurate representation…
That’s a good suggestion. Multiple live deals necessitate more capacity vs. someone only doing marketing books - but there’s still fault in that. I’ve worked with some partners that were just shit at their job but they absolutely GRINDED juniors, their deals just never made it past the business development phase. They were eventually let go, but it would’ve been wrong to penalize the junior for rating that type of work as intense given the nature of the senior leading the team.
I think there’s no perfect way to accurately gauge capacity, because it fluctuates on a dime. The best we can probably do is capture more data points on a more frequent basis, but we’ll always need the staffer to be that person to validate things before putting a team together. I think comparative analysis is the safest bet for now but it would be cool to see if banks innovate here at all. It’s kinda a clusterfuck being the staffer so I don’t know how’d you fix it
I do not know about best, but the worst I have heard about is volunteer staffing for covering accounts. All staffings are just luck-based on if the accounts you volunteered for earlier convert into something relevant. It also creates massive differences in capacity and experience for juniors.
Dolores sapiente quis vel porro repudiandae. Soluta voluptates qui sit quasi in quis rerum. Ipsum inventore quo et officiis cum aperiam. Ut quis libero eos.
Assumenda vero non eligendi et et. Fugit quia voluptate ea mollitia deserunt asperiores. Aut et doloremque qui adipisci omnis fuga.
Quaerat cumque amet soluta culpa odit. Ipsa dolor mollitia amet rerum ratione dolores.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...