Utilisation, Honestly

Utilisation is the proportion of available time spent on chargeable or project work. It is a reasonable planning measure and a poor individual target.

What it is for

Capacity planning. Whether the organisation has more work than people or the reverse.

Pricing. Rates have to recover the cost of non-chargeable time, and knowing the proportion is how you set them.

Spotting structural trouble: a team whose utilisation has been falling for two quarters has a pipeline problem.

All three are aggregate questions answered at team or practice level.

What happens when it becomes an individual target

Supervision stops. It is not chargeable, and the senior person with a target does less of it.

Training stops, for the same reason.

Business development stops, which is the slowest and most damaging version.

Internal improvement stops, so the tooling and the process decay.

Time gets recorded to fit the target, which destroys the costing data.

Work gets hoarded rather than shared, because giving a task away lowers your number.

Each of these is rational under the measure, which is why exhortation does not fix it.

The measure moves the wrong way

The specific trap worth naming.

A team with too little work has high availability and low utilisation.

A team drowning has high utilisation and is about to lose people.

So high utilisation is read as good and is frequently a warning, and a target set at a high figure is an instruction to be permanently at capacity.

Sustained utilisation above the level the work actually allows is achieved by recording, not by working, which returns to the data quality problem.

What to use instead

Utilisation at team level, as a planning input, not a target.

Capacity against committed work, which is the question people usually mean.

Non-chargeable time by category, so that supervision and business development are visible as investments rather than as leakage.

Hours beyond contracted, which is the welfare measure and the one that catches the drowning team that the utilisation figure flatters.

If a target exists anyway

Set it well below theoretical capacity, with the non-chargeable allowance stated rather than implied.

Name what the allowance is for: supervision, training, improvement, business development.

Exclude those categories from the calculation rather than expecting people to absorb them.

Report at team level and use the individual figure only as an input to a conversation, never as the conversation.

Watch for the signal that it has become a fiction: individual figures clustering just above the target, and a rising gap between recorded utilisation and delivered work.

What to report

Utilisation by team, trended, with the definition stated.

Non-chargeable time by category.

Capacity against pipeline.

Hours beyond contracted, in aggregate.

Not: individual utilisation league tables, which measure the work someone was given and reliably produce the behaviours above.

Excluding the investment categories

The configuration choice that stops a target destroying what it measures.

Supervision, training, internal improvement and business development are investments, not leakage.

Exclude them from the denominator rather than expecting people to absorb them.

Name them in the target's definition, so the allowance is explicit rather than implied.

Report them separately as a portfolio figure, which is where they belong.

Without this, the target is an instruction to stop doing them, and the organisation notices two years later.

Reading a high figure correctly

The interpretation that inverts the usual reflex.

A team at very high utilisation is not performing well; it is at capacity with no slack.

No slack means no absorption of the unexpected, no improvement work, and no training.

Sustained, it predicts attrition better than it predicts profit.

Check it against hours beyond contracted. High utilisation achieved within contracted hours is a different situation from the same figure achieved by working late.

Report the pair together, because either alone tells the wrong story.

A useful implementation prompt

During configuration, explore the sector example can be used as a prompt for questions about fields, ownership and output. Confirm current capabilities with the provider and document any plan, integration or policy assumption behind the decision.