Michaela,

Mason Jones, on our team, has some experience in this area.

Feel free to contact him directly: 713.355.4450

Good luck,

Steve

Michaela,
I really like the remote service projects as they reduce the ‘wear and tear’ of travel on the team.  But as you point out, scheduling this around blocks of travel is tricky.  We have enough of these projects to justify keeping 1.5 consultants available to cover remote gigs.  So my strategy is to keep one consultant off travel.  This consultant can generally interleave 2-3 simultaneous multi-week remote projects.  Either the consultant or a project manager can keep the time & schedule straight.  For the .5 person, I use the remote projects to absorb bench time, making benched resources available to the dedicated remote consultant to use on identified tasks or deliverables.

This strategy relies though on there being enough work to justify at least one dedicated remote resource, and the nature of work being such that the work schedule is flexible so multiple projects can be interwoven.

Regards,


Bruce Irving

One way to accomplish this is to extend the option to your consultants to rotate into the SaaS delivery department for a 3 month assignment - to get them off the road for a period of time.  Also, as more business transitions to SaaS, more focused resources will be required and the measures for utilization will need to be adjusted - SaaS is no longer an hour-for-hour billable situation.  So keep that in mind especially if you have compensation/bonus tied to billable utilization.

Debbie S.