The most convincing way to illustrate the need for more staff is to get your management up to speed on your existing staff's current responsibilities. A concise report showing personnel, projects, deliverables, delivery dates and service-level agreements will serve two purposes: It will remind management of all the output they've previously demanded of you, and it will illustrate how widely dispersed your staff really is.

The natural inclination of those you're trying to convince is to believe that your staff probably isn't working at full capacity. It's important to understand that every organization has a mixture of strong and weak contributors. Often, the problem is that the weak employees aren't always weak enough to warrant termination. However, there's no easy way to illustrate this point when looking at the departmental manning report. Therefore, your challenge is to quantify the aggregate output of your entire staff when speaking to work-force efficiency.

I've found that the most effective method of getting approval is to plead your case in person. While it's easy for senior management to reject your memo, you may get more attention when you meet face-to-face. Furthermore, in that meeting with your boss or bosses, there's no substitute for being prepared. A longtime friend and colleague of mine, Arturo de los Santos, director of information technology at HEB Federal Credit Union in San Antonio, recently began overseeing a new project whose implementation demanded some staff additions. Knowing it would be difficult to convince management to approve the new positions, de los Santos assembled an executive presentation showing all the department's current projects, the team members assigned to each project and the corresponding percentage of time each team member was dedicating to the various tasks. Thanks to this presentation, the executives ascertained there was no way de los Santos' staff could deliver the current projects on time while taking on the new initiative.

The percentages in de los Santos' presentation were critical. In general, you will have better success if you can state the benefits in quantifiable business terms: "We'll be able to install the new software in half the time, and that alone will cut the time to produce a widget to five days." By contrast, nebulous comments like "better service" or "increased output" will be less convincing. Demonstrate to your bosses that you realize your role in contributing to the bottom line.

Like de los Santos, Matt Horman, manager of patient applications development at Children's Hospital, Boston, knew that the only way to effectively justify his staffing request was to show facts. To arrive at the critical numbers, Horman developed a simple Web-based application that all staff use to report time spent on projects. Developers, for instance, log time invested in development, research, meetings, support calls, training and anything else that consumes a portion of their workdays. Although the staff members initially were skeptical about the Big Brother aspect, they soon realized this tool shows how hard they really work. Horman ported the application's output into various reports and graphs to show where employees spend their time.

But why is it so difficult to justify personnel additions? The answer usually boils down to the issue of capital budget versus operating budget. It is much easier to draw a quantifiable boundary around a capital project, such as installing an ERP (enterprise-resource planning) or new patient-accounting system. These projects have definitive start and end dates, with budgets that are approved as a whole, as one-time expenditures. The more challenging task is to hire staff whose salaries are added to your ongoing operating budget.

I faced this challenge in the late 1990s, as the director of the network and integration division at the State University of New York at Stony Brook's University Hospital and Medical Center, where I oversaw a major overhaul of the network infrastructure. While I had to devote resources to getting the project completed on tight deadline, I needed to maintain the network's existing service levels. I simply could not devote the entire staff to the network migration. At the outset of the project, I worked with Cabletron Systems (now Enterasys Networks) on a detailed project plan showing exactly what resources would be needed for the analysis/design, installation and operational phases of the project. I presented both an executive summary and the detailed plan to senior management, taking into consideration the experience levels and current workload of existing staff and identifying where we required new hires. Surprisingly, the senior managers disregarded the executive summary and instead showed great interest in the detailed report, which drilled down to the task level.

Essentially, I needed a mix of approximately 60 percent short-term and 40 percent long-term resources. The temporary staff would be used purely as consulting and installation labor. The additional permanent staff would remain to help operate the new environment.

Pretty straightforward stuff, right? The big challenge was to show why the existing staff couldn't just take over once the temporaries left. While the new equipment provided a plethora of improved performance and service features, complexities were introduced in the areas of training, support and administration. Much of the cost-benefit-analysis presentation to senior management concerned tangible improvements in bandwidth, reliability and integrating the various islands of nonstandard networks. These benefits outweighed the cost of hiring the staff required to implement the project and maintain the new environment. But it took a strong presentation, complete with face time and facts, to bring management around.