Consulting Workplan and Resource Tracker
Three documents and three sheets that estimate every task in days, balance the total to your fee, and forecast the rest from finished work.
Free download · No account needed
Workplan · Marchgate Consulting LLC · Vantonbury Foods Inc. distribution network review
$164,000 fixed · $820 per consultant day · 200 days sold · 7 Sep to 27 Nov 2026
| Ref | Task | Type | Owner | Weeks | Est |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-01 | Kickoff, data request and system access | Coordination | Ackworth | 1 | 4 |
| T-02 | Site visit schedule and logistics | Coordination | Reidsvik | 1–2 | 3 |
| T-03 | Current network baseline: volumes, lanes, costs | Analysis | Ostergaard | 1–3 | 16 |
| T-04 | Cost-to-serve data validation | Analysis | Fanshawe | 2–3 | 10 |
| T-05 | Six distribution center site visits | Coordination | Reidsvik | 4–5 | 9 |
| T-06 | Transport lane cost model | Analysis | Ostergaard | 4–6 | 20 |
| T-07 | Inventory positioning analysis | Analysis | Tavendale | 5–7 | 14 |
| T-08 | Service level and lead time analysis | Analysis | Tavendale | 5–7 | 12 |
| T-09 | Network scenario modeling, four scenarios | Analysis | Ostergaard | 6–9 | 24 |
| T-10 | Warehouse capacity assessment | Analysis | Reidsvik | 7–9 | 14 |
| T-11 | Steering meetings and weekly reporting | Coordination | Ackworth | 1–12 | 8 |
| T-12 | Findings pack | Writing | Ackworth | 9–10 | 16 |
| T-13 | Business case and recommendation | Writing | Ackworth | 10–11 | 20 |
| T-14 | Board presentation and handover | Writing | Ackworth | 11–12 | 18 |
| C-01 | Contingency | 12 | |||
| Total | 200 |
The estimate column is the fee. Fourteen tasks at 188 days, a contingency line of 12, and a total equal to the 200 days $164,000 buys at $820. A plan that does not balance is unprofitable before the kickoff, and you can read it here rather than in the final timesheet.
Then the column no workplan has. Five consultants at four client-days is 20 a week. Phased across its own task spans, this plan asks for 20.5 in week 5 and 22.0 in week 6. Two weeks do not fit, and they do not become cheaper. They become later.
Coordination 24 days, analysis 110, writing 54. Three types because they miss by three different multiples, which is what the forecast turns on.
Search this and every result is a task list. Phases, workstreams, tasks, owners, start and end dates, a dependency column, a done condition, a weekly cadence. Good artifacts, and there is no money in any of them. The fee sits in the proposal and the days sit in the timesheet. Nothing joins them until somebody totals the timesheet at the end, which is the most dependable way there is to find a fixed-fee loss far too late to do anything about it.
This pack joins them in the estimate column. $164,000 at $820 a day is 200 days sold, so Marchgate Consulting's fourteen tasks are estimated at 188 days with a contingency line of 12, and the total is 200 exactly. Then the forecast, which comes only from tasks that are finished. Four are done at the end of week 3, and their actual days over their estimated days is 1.14 on coordination and 1.38 on analysis.
Applied to the 155 days still open, that puts the engagement at 252 days against 200, or $42,640 over. In the same week, days consumed read 23% of the fee at 25% of the elapsed schedule, which is under budget on any burn chart. So the alarm here is the forecast crossing the fee rather than consumption crossing a line, which is the cost-notice limb nobody implements. The plan comes from the signed scope, its estimates from the proposal that priced it, and the weekly summary from the status report.
What's in the pack
Task Register
One row per task with a work type, an owner, an estimate in days, an actual, and a realized factor on the finished ones. The closing retrospective runs on this same task-type split.
Burn Against Fee
Week by week: days the plan asks for, days the team has, days consumed, and the fee-consumed and elapsed columns side by side.
Forecast to Complete
The factor per work type, the estimate to complete, the forecast total against days sold, and the realized day rate at completion.
Workplan
The plan the engagement runs on, balanced to days sold, with every assumption carrying the days it costs if it fails. Budget the review too: checking a deliverable claim by claim runs about two minutes a claim.
Variance Note
Three parts, always: the scope that comes out with the days it returns, the overrun that gets priced, and the residual absorbed.
What a Fixed Fee Buys
The standard behind the pack, including why a completion percentage is never an input and where the three handoffs are.
How it works
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River with the signed scope and your recorded time, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and fill them in yourself.
- 2
Balance to the fee
Every task gets an estimate in days and a work type, then the total is compared to the days your fee bought. A plan that does not balance is the finding.
- 3
Mark what is finished
Tasks are not started, in progress or finished, with no percentage anywhere. Only the finished ones produce the factor the forecast runs on.
- 4
Read the forecast
The forecast total lands next to days sold, with the realized day rate at completion, the weeks over capacity, and the scope that still buys the gap back.
Frequently asked questions
Is this consulting workplan template free, and what format is it in?
Yes. Download gives you the whole pack with no account and no email: three Word documents and three CSV sheets, opening natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets, with a PDF option on the documents via ?format=pdf. Edit with AI creates a free account and installs the same pack as a private Space, filled in from your scope, fee and recorded time.
Why is there no percent complete column?
Because it is the one number in a burn forecast that nobody can check. A completion percentage is asserted about work in progress, and two people looking at the same half-built model will say 40% and 70%. Finished tasks are facts, so only finished tasks produce the factor.
Do I need a timesheet system for this to work?
No. Days at task level is enough, and it can arrive as a spreadsheet or as somebody's recollection of the last three weeks. What matters is which tasks are finished and what they cost, because that pair is the only input the forecast has.
The fee was a lump sum with no day rate behind it. Now what?
Use the firm's standard rate to derive days sold, and record in the sheet that it was derived rather than contracted. Checking whether an estimate is realistic against what the work actually costs is standard practice in federal cost realism analysis too.
Does this replace my Gantt chart or project plan?
It replaces the estimate and tracking half of it. Task, owner, week span and dependency all live here; if you want a bar chart for a steering pack, build it from the Task Register. What the plan does not have anywhere else is a day estimate that adds up to the fee.
What happens when the overrun is the client's fault?
It stops being a variance and becomes a priced change. The Task Register already holds the task, the estimate, the actual and the assumption that failed, which is most of what a change needs. From there the change order pack prices it properly.
Where do capability-transfer training sessions go in this workplan?
As their own work type, same as coordination, analysis or writing: an estimate in days, an owner, and a realized factor once sessions are finished. This pack tracks what those sessions actually transfer, since a task finishing on schedule and a skill actually landing are different questions the workplan alone can't answer.
Find the overrun in week three
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or send River the signed scope, the day rate and your recorded time and get the forecast back.
Edit with AI