Built AI-Powered People-Risk Heat Map, Landing $40K Consulting Engagement

Traditional people metrics — attrition, turnover, time to hire — are typically reported in isolation, disconnected from the operational deliverables they actually threaten. As Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Tandem People Partners, I saw an opportunity to close that gap: instead of just tracking whether turnover was trending up or down, I wanted to build a tool that showed how a specific vacancy, leave of absence, or flight risk in a key role could directly jeopardize a critical business deliverable. This kind of connected, operationally-relevant insight is far more actionable for leadership than aggregate HR dashboards, and building a sellable product around it was central to my mandate as a firm owner.

To bring this to life, I first mapped out a standard people dashboard and built a representative dataset for a sample organization, then did the same for an operations dashboard focused on deliverables. I identified the key roles tied to those deliverables and built out a range of realistic scenarios — absences, leaves of absence, and varying flight-risk levels — factoring in variables like incumbent knowledge level, time to hire, and market conditions. Using AI, I developed a React-based tool that unified these datasets into a single interactive heat map, visualizing in real time how staffing risk in specific roles translated into delivery risk across the organization.

Since completing the tool, I've demoed it to three prospective clients. One signed on for a pilot engagement, which successfully identified two key roles at flight risk tied to a major deliverable for their business. That pilot has since converted into a $40K consulting engagement to build out their full, customized risk map — validating both the tool's practical value and its potential as a repeatable, sellable offering for the firm.