What is a Pod in a Professional Services Firm?
If you work in public accounting or in some other form of professional services firm, you understand the challenge of matching your firm's capabilities to the varying demands and deadlines of your clients. Over the years I've seen many different ways that firms handle their resource allocation in order to meet this challenge. In order to properly serve their clients, professional services firms need to make decisions about which engagements are priority and who gets staffed on any given engagement. Today, I'm going to share with you the core concepts behind utilizing a pod system in a professional services firm to get things done efficiently and effectively. Let's jump in!
What is a “Pod” Anyways?
In the corporate world, a pod can refer to a varying number of things. Today we will define a Pod as A group of professionals carefully selected to work together on a group of engagements. Pods are generally created such that each pod has a proper mix of different levels of professionals, skill sets, and industry experience so that they can handle the clients that they are responsible for relatively autonomously. In a small or medium sized public accounting firm, a pod would typically consist of the same number of professionals needed on a typical engagement team. In my experience it worked best with one associate (1 to 2 years of experience), one senior associate (3 to 5 years of experience), and one manager (4 to 6 years of experience) in a single pod.
How is this Different from Regular Assignments?
Traditionally, firms will assign their personnel to various engagements based on the same levels described above. A certain engagement will need a certain number of associates, a certain number of senior associates, a certain number of managers, and so on. This gets complicated at small firms that have multiple engagements going on at once. Under a traditional system, one associate might be on three different engagements, and the senior that shares one of those engagements might be on two other engagements at the same time which might involve two different managers. The challenge arises when it comes to work assignment and priority because each engagement has a different priority and is utilizing a different mix of resources. Under a pod system, you would ideally have that manager, senior associate, and associate, all working together on their assigned engagements. When one of those engages becomes a priority, it's easy for that team to pivot and focus because all three of them would have the same priority. This benefit becomes very apparent when you contrast it with the alternative of one manager asking two other managers if they can have a given associate and Senior associate prioritize their job instead of the other two jobs because something came up.
What Are the Main Benefits of This System?
When structured properly, a pod system should help significantly with the following areas:
Client service - having each client assigned to a pod and not a haphazardly selected group of people allows for better prioritization and communication with the client. This becomes especially apparent when an engagement team is juggling multiple projects and they can hold each other accountable for communications and deadlines for all the clients they are working on together.
Personnel development - Honor traditional systems, managers who are having a difficult time with their associate are often tempted to simply roll up their sleeves and finish the engagements of the associate can go somewhere else. Under a pod system they are stuck together, for better or for worse. This dynamic creates two incredibly valuable opportunities for the firm's personnel development:
Managers investment - it is unfortunately not uncommon for managers to simply not invest in the training of their associates if they know they only have to deal with them for a single engagement. Under a pod system, that associate will keep coming back to that same manager, which means that it's in the manager's interest to train them up for their own benefit.
Actionable feedback opportunities - under a pod system, I had to provide feedback to my team on an almost weekly basis that would get documented with human resources. In my pod, I made a conscious effort to highlight one area of improvement and one area where they did well on a given engagement for every feedback form we needed to fill out. Because I was going to be working with these same people again, I made a conscious effort to Ensure that they were given the opportunity to act on the areas where we determined they needed to improve. I cannot understate how valuable this dynamic became over the course of a busy season because it allowed me to develop my professionals with a documented case study of highlights and improvement on a weekly basis.
Workflow planning and prioritization - when the same engagement team works together on multiple engagements, it is considerably easier to pick up and put down work depending on what's available. In my experience, I was able to create a priority list for my pod that spanned multiple engagements at various stages of completion. Did we run out of work for this engagement? Go start this new one. As a manager, I went out of my way to secure work early for certain engagements so my team could work on it in their down time from other engagements. This style of workflow management cannot work well under a traditional assignment system because it requires the engagement team to all have the same priorities.
Will this Work for Me?
In our profession, the answer is always it depends. If you were working for a big four firm and only work on a few clients a year, upon system probably isn't necessary for your team to be successful. If your entire firm is three people, congratulations! Your whole firm is a pod, and you don't need any additional guidance from me because you don't have any options. But if you are working in an accounting firm of 50 to 300 people spread across varying disciplines and specializations, I think it's worth considering implementing a pod system to your model. If you are a firm owner or manager and want to talk more about this, be sure to reach out!