Ask HN: What do you use to make headcount planning less painful?

- Convincing and aligning with multiple people (my boss, HR, finance) that we need to hire X more people to hit whatever business goal or do some project. This results in a bunch of painful meetings and there's always one person that jumps in towards the end and re-questions if we need more people.

- Estimating the optimal number of people I actually need to deliver Y. I often underestimate which has rippling effects on putting more strain on the existing team and us always feeling behind.

- Working with too many spreadsheets! Needing to create multiple scenarios, data discrepancies which come from collaborators making their tweaks, etc... Wasted time reconciling what the latest or final proposal is.

Also the pain you mentioned is exponential with those tools compared to in Excel. You’ll never have perfect budget unless you have a crystal ball and can anticipate everything that will change. Just explain the variance and move on. Forecasting is meant to somewhat solve this issue. Budget become quickly stale, the forecast is budget altered by a few big issues (usually things unknown during the budget). Also usually helpful to replace budget with actual as they become available

In the 1st column write the projects and next a column with your estimates of man-weeks required. Here is where you should modulate the estimate depending on how business looks at these things: Do they know it's an estimate planning tool? Add the 30% overhead of your estimate: Shit always happens. Does business take your estimates as law? Add 50% padding.

Once you have that framework, get the milestones/end dates from business. These usually come as "having X feature in Q1", Y feature in Q3. So you have some leeway.

Start mapping how many engineer weeks would you need for each task for each week to finish in the milestone, ensuring you dont get to negative in the top (total engineers) row.

You also should consider the mythical man month: putting 10 engineers in a feature will most likely make it fail, not go super fast. Usually you want 3 or at most 4 ppl per project. This also depends on the size of the project.

With this data, you'll be able to show business that additional prioritizing needs to be done. On the flipside, they will question you your time estimates. You can use that to push to sit down and clarify/detail the project, maybe even split it in stages: the Gantt will allow you to model feature releases of a large project.

I used this framework successfully, and it served as a great communication tool between the CEO and myself (as head of Engineering).

I’ve used various software to help, but it always comes back to spreadsheets. It’s usually too business specific and rapidly changing to try to use something off the self. Even when you build your perfect custom module in a software like Anaplan, Adaptive, Hyperion, etc. you’re at risk because the very algorithm of how you model labor can and does change and sometimes frequently even though you may think that’s something that should be rather set & forget it’s not. So the adhoc-ability of spreadsheets win.

The human processes are much more difficult to wrangle and change in a whim. If you’re growing fast, usually prioritization has to come into place and it’s like a horse race. Even some role that’s not even planned can suddenly pop up and get hired without budget. This happens a lot when the perfect candidate comes available and the company wasn’t originally going to hire but don’t want to miss the opportunity.

I’d love to be able to say, go build this B2B solution HN! But honestly, I have a hard time imagining anything would compete with the spreadsheet. It’s not like people haven’t already tried, it just doesn’t work well in practice for the end users.