Engagement = project, deliverable = page
Each engagement is a project with its own board, timeline and pages. Deliverables are written where the work is tracked, and backlinks show what depends on what.
Feature details
Consulting & professional services
Keep the engagement, the deliverable and the knowledge in one place.
When a senior consultant leaves, the client history and the methodology leave with them. When utilisation slips, nobody sees it until the quarter closes. Tenon keeps every engagement as a project, every deliverable as a page, and every person's load on a heatmap.
Recommended: Tenon Cloud Business, or self-hosted Enterprise with an organization per client
66.4% billable utilisation
Average billable utilisation across professional services organizations fell to 66.4% in 2026, well short of the 75% considered healthy. Firms with strong change control deliver on time 86% of the time; weak ones, 62%.
Source: Professional services benchmarks, Deltek / SPI
What goes wrong today
The three problems we hear most from consulting & professional services.
- Knowledge walks out the doorClient relationship history, methodologies and organizational context live in a partner's head and inbox. Firms rarely have a system that captures them.
- Utilisation is a quarterly surpriseWork is spread across spreadsheets, email, chat and decks. Project managers spend the week gathering updates instead of managing.
- Scope changes are informalA client asks for "one more thing" on a call. Nobody records it. The engagement runs over and the conversation about why happens after the invoice.
How Tenon fits
Four things that change on day one.
Utilisation on the heatmap
The resource heatmap shows every consultant's load across every engagement. Light, optimal, overloaded, by day, before the timesheets arrive.
Feature detailsChange requests as decision cards
The "one more thing" becomes a decision card in the engagement channel: what was asked, who agreed, what it costs. Findable at invoice time.
Feature detailsFirm memory you can ask
Brain reads past engagement pages and tickets you have access to. "What did we recommend to the last logistics client on warehouse software?" gets an answer with links.
Feature details
In the product
What it looks like for consulting & professional services.
Utilisation, dailyWho is light, who is optimal, who is overloaded, across every engagement.
Engagement timelineMilestones per consultant, with the week where two deliverables collide visible in advance.
Scope decisions, pinnedThe "one more thing" recorded with who agreed and what it costs.
Three projects, ready to copy
How to set up the board, the fields and the pages.
These are complete configurations, not suggestions. Create the project, add these columns and custom fields, create the pages, and the rituals column tells you which Tenon features carry the week.
Client engagement
Run a 12-week engagement from kickoff to final deliverable with scope under control.
Board columns
- Kickoff
- Discovery
- Analysis
- Client review
- Final
- Closed
Custom fields
- Workstream (select)
- Billable (select: yes, no)
- Milestone (date)
Pages
- Statement of work
- Discovery findings
- Recommendations deck outline
- Steering committee notes
Rituals
Timeline for milestones. Decision cards for every scope change. Weekly steering summary generated by Brain from the board and shared as a page.
Proposal and pursuit
Win the work: coordinate the pursuit team and reuse what the firm already knows.
Board columns
- Qualifying
- Drafting
- Pricing
- Internal review
- Submitted
- Won / Lost
Custom fields
- Deal size (number)
- Sector (select)
- Decision date (date)
Pages
- Proposal draft
- Win themes
- Pricing assumptions
- Lessons from last pursuit
Rituals
Brain asked for relevant past engagements at kickoff. Internal review column has a 2-day stuck threshold. Won/Lost debrief recorded as a page linked from the pursuit.
Practice knowledge base
Capture methodology and client context so it survives staff turnover.
Board columns
- Suggested
- Drafting
- Peer review
- Published
- Needs update
Custom fields
- Practice area (select)
- Last reviewed (date)
- Owner (text)
Pages
- Method playbooks
- Sector primers
- Client context notes
- Templates
Rituals
Quarterly review: pages not touched in a year move to Needs update. Backlinks show which engagements used each playbook.
A week with Tenon
What Monday, Wednesday and Friday look like.
- Monday: Grace opens the resource heatmap. Jordan is at full load all week across three engagements. The mobile team has capacity. She moves two workstreams and records the decision.
- Wednesday: a client asks for a competitor benchmark that was not in the SOW. The engagement lead records it as a decision card (out of scope, priced separately) and links the SOW page. Nobody argues about it in December.
- Friday: a partner is leaving. Her client context notes, recommendations and steering summaries are pages inside the engagements. The handover meeting is forty minutes, not four weeks.
Illustrative scenario based on how teams in this sector describe their week.
Questions
Common questions from consulting & professional services.
Does Tenon do time tracking and invoicing?
Not today. Tenon tracks the work, the load and the deliverables; export via the API or the database to your billing system. Time tracking is on the roadmap.
Can each client have its own space?
Yes. On self-hosted Enterprise, one organization per client on a single deployment. On Cloud, one account per organization.
Can clients see only their engagement?
Invite them as members of their own organization, or share specific pages by public link. Row Level Security keeps everything else invisible.
Other industries
Similar problems, different vocabulary.
Set it up for your team this afternoon.
Start free on Tenon Cloud, or self-host it. Copy one of the project setups above and you have a working board in ten minutes.