Professional services
Planning and utilisation
Whether you can take a job in October, and how much of the time you paid for actually reached a client. Both against real availability.
Two questions that share one denominator: real availability — scheduled hours, less public holidays, less approved leave, per person. Neither is answerable against a headcount times forty, and this is the figure a tool without HR in the same database cannot produce.
Planning
An allocation is what somebody is expected to be doing, which is knowable months before any of it exists as a task. It is deliberately separate from what has been assigned to them.
A plan and its work items are never added together
They are the same hours described twice. Summing them would double-count exactly the people who are best planned, and the person who plans nothing would look like the one with capacity.
Allocations are minutes per working day, not a percentage and not a total. A percentage needs a base that changes with FTE, holidays and leave, so the same figure would mean different things in different weeks; a total needs a delivery profile nobody agreed to. “Three days a week” is four hours a day on a five-day week, and it survives a bank holiday without restating anything.
Three certainties
| Certainty | Means | Reduces free capacity? |
|---|---|---|
| Committed | Somebody is going to do this. Signed, or as good as. | Yes |
| Likely | A proposal out, a renewal expected. | No |
| Being considered | In the plan so its shape is visible. | No |
Only committed work reduces what is free
That is the whole reason the other two exist. A plan recording only confirmed work cannot answer “can we take this job in October”; one treating a proposal as a commitment would refuse work you could actually do.
Somebody over-committed contributes nothing to the company's free capacity rather than a negative — letting one person's overrun cancel a colleague's spare time would report a company as able to take work it cannot staff. And somebody whose availability cannot be resolved is reported as unresolved rather than as zero, because zero reads as fully committed and would have a leaver permanently blocking work nobody was going to give them.
Utilisation
Chargeable hours over available hours. Scheduled hours punish somebody for taking their holiday; recorded hours reward somebody for not logging anything else. Available is the only denominator that asks what it means to ask.
Chargeable is not the same as billed
Work covered by a retainer, included in a flat fee or absorbed above a cap is chargeable delivery — it was done for a client and the client paid for it, just not per hour. Counting only invoiced hours would report every retainer team as idle in the month their client kept them busiest. Only written-off work is excluded.
The share of what was logged is shown beside it, never instead of it
Dividing by what somebody recorded makes anybody who logs only their billable time look perfectly utilised — the classic way this number is quietly gamed, usually without anybody intending to. The gap between the two figures is how much paid time was never recorded at all.
The company figure is summed and then divided, never an average of the per-person figures — an average weights a part-timer's month the same as a full-timer's and produces a number nobody can reconcile to the hours underneath.
Targets
An organisation-wide default with a per-person override, because a delivery engineer and the person who runs the company are not measured against the same bar. No target is not a target of nothing — an absent one is reported as absent and the figure stands alone, where zero would report everybody as exceeding it. Above 100% is refused: leave and holidays are already out of the denominator, so 100% means every remaining hour is chargeable.