Project management for consulting firms, one shared week

Sunday night, and five engagement decks are open on the partner's second screen, each one scrolled to its workplan page, and none of the five agrees with the others. The new client wants a Thursday kick-off, there are already two SteerCos in diaries that week, and the analyst she would put on the kick-off is the same person turning slides for both of them. She says yes to Thursday, because the alternative is losing the work. Monday at 8:30 three people crowd around one screen and drag names across a staffing spreadsheet until it stops being obviously wrong.

Project management for consulting firms, week by week

You sell an engagement on a proposal, confirm it with an engagement letter, run it 4 to 12 weeks on a fixed fee or a day rate, and staff it with two to four people. Week 1 is kick-off, when you frame the hypothesis, ghost the end deck with page titles only, send the data request list, and fix the cadence, and after that the rhythm barely varies: a problem-solving session early in the week, a client check-in midweek, slide production against the storyboard, and every two or three weeks a SteerCo where the deck has to be answer-first and decision-ready. Near the midpoint an interim readout resets scope, and at the end there is a final readout that becomes the deliverable, then a wash-up that half the time nobody runs, because the next kick-off is Monday.

Three to six of these overlap, plus a live proposal or two, with the partner selling the next engagement while delivering the current ones, the EM owning each workplan and storyboard, and analysts sitting across two or three engagements at once. Nobody planned that split, it accreted request by request, and with no PMO and no staffing coordinator to catch it, that is usually the point where the week comes apart.

Staffing and resource planning for a consulting team

Project management in a firm this size mostly comes down to one recurring question: who is on what this week. ToDoing puts the whole firm's week on one grid. Rows by person show who is loaded, who is free on Thursday, and who is genuinely on the beach, and switching the same grid to rows by project puts every engagement's week side by side, which is the view that currently lives across five different decks. You drag a task to move it to another day or another person, and everyone else sees it in under a second. Each consultant opens My Week and sees only their own days, drawn from the same rows as the grid, so what they see privately can never drift from what the firm grid shows, and nobody has to re-key anything into a spreadsheet on Monday morning.

Keeping the plan honest around a SteerCo that will not move

Milestones in ToDoing sit on the same calendar as tasks, in the project's colour. Put the interim readout and the SteerCo on it, and the days between them become a visible stretch of working days on the grid, not just two dates on a slide. When the readout slips a week, you drag the flag. The squeeze shows up on the grid immediately, days before the nights and weekends arrive rather than the morning of the dry run. Unfinished tasks roll forward to today on their own each working day, so a plan cannot sit there looking complete when the work behind it has slipped. Work with no date yet goes in a Someday column, which is where most of the phase 2 thinking belongs anyway. There is more on that habit in plan the week, not the backlog.

Who is free for Tuesday's client workshop

Finding out usually takes a Slack thread and a few back-and-forth maybes, because whoever is asking has to check a leave system and an engagement plan that were never built to talk to each other. On the Pro plan, ToDoing books time off with half days, one approver and balances. Public holidays come by country and region, which matters the moment you staff across two markets. There is a team wall chart, so the analyst on annual leave Thursday is not a person you can promise the client. You can subscribe to the feed from any calendar that takes an iCal link, or mirror an external leave calendar you already run.

What erodes a fixed fee

Fixed-fee work rarely dies from one bad decision, it is more often a dozen unlogged half days of extra analysis that nobody priced, adding up quietly until the margin is gone. Tracking, on the Enterprise plan, is deliberately small: ticking a task done logs the time you planned for it, with a one-tap adjust if the day went differently, and there are no timers or timesheets to fill in. Each project carries a budget in days or hours and a burn bar that tracks against it, and the report breaks the same numbers down by person and by task type, exports to CSV, and keeps rates visible to admins only. Estimation on the same plan reads your own completed history and gives a median and a p80 per task type, so the next SOW gets priced against real numbers rather than whichever partner's gut feeling wins the room. It prints a client-facing quote, and the accuracy view shows where your estimates and your measured effort part company.

What ToDoing will not do for a consulting firm

It has no proposal pipeline and no CRM, so which SOWs are out and what might land stays wherever you track it now. It holds rates for costing a quote, not a billing rate card: it does not invoice and it does not do revenue recognition. Tracking confirms the plan at day or hour grain, so it will not feed client invoices. There is no utilisation report either, only visible capacity on a shared week. It does not manage documents either; the storyboard and the model stay in PowerPoint and Excel, where they belong. There is no client portal and no client-facing status view. If your firm mainly hurts on invoicing and pipeline, a PSA like Productive or Kantata will fit better. ToDoing is narrower than that: it is about knowing who is on what this week, and whether the readout is still on track.

Three questions consulting firms ask

What is the best project management software for a small consulting firm?

There is no single answer, but the size of the firm narrows it fast. ToDoing is built for service teams of roughly 3 to 15, which covers most boutiques and the delivery side of a larger practice. Above about 15 people you will want something with a real staffing model and utilisation reporting.

Can ToDoing replace our staffing spreadsheet?

For the weekly question, yes. The grid shows who is on what, you re-staff by dragging, and everyone sees the change at once. For forward pipeline scenarios ("if these two proposals land in September"), it will not do that; compare Float and Resource Guru if that is the real need.

How is it different from Asana or Notion for running engagements?

Those are a backlog and a database. ToDoing shows you the week itself, with people already in it. See ToDoing vs Asana and ToDoing vs Notion for the honest version.

At the time of writing, July 2026, Pro is $2 per person per month or $20 a year and Enterprise is $6 or $60, with a 14-day full trial. Free covers 3 people and 3 projects and never asks for a card, which is enough to run one engagement and see whether the week holds.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, architects, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, recruitment agencies, software studios, video production.