Utilisation can be measured against a person's capacity or their billable target. Monitoring utilisation helps you understand a key business metric.
Utilisation is a key concept used to measure people's work effort against different categories and targets. It is able to be viewed in many ways; by person, by team, by role, by organisation etc.
An important metric for a services business is to have the right amount of effort being spent on billable activities. That doesn't mean that everyone's effort must be billed to customers and there are roles (such as sales, management and admin) which are essential to running a business, but aren't necessarily billed.
However, it is important to understand how the workforce is spending their time, and to measure that against the targets that have been set.
When projects are created, they are set as either billable or non-billable. These are the high level categories that all effort (timesheets) are automatically categorised as. Leave (personal leave and public holidays) is also factored in to complete the picture.
Within billable projects there is also the option to set a timecode to be classed as non-billable. Utilisation can then be set to exclude time logged on non-billable timecodes if required.
Projectworks makes it easy to track the utilisation of your people and teams, with the necessary data being captured as people enter their timesheets.
Setting a person's utilisation
When setting up a person you need to specify their standard work week capacity. The capacity is set on their positing therefore Projectworks knows on any given day what are the expected hours a person would be able to work.
A utilisation target percentage can be set to indicate the amount of their work week that is expected (or budgeted) to be on billable projects.
Your Projectworks administrator can set up customised work weeks in the admin section. That allows customised work weeks to be created for any people who work a non-standard hours, such as not working on Friday, or working 4 hours per day.
When looking at the Resourcing by Availability screen, the combined capacity is represented by the grey line and the combined utilisation target by the pink line.
Utilisation example
A person with a 40 hour work week capacity and a utilisation target of 75% would be expected/budgeted to record 30 hours per week against billable activities.
Monitoring utilisation
Monitoring utilisation of people provides valuable insight to your workforce. Timesheets and future resourcing is automatically categorised and combined with leave and holidays, provide a complete picture of the high level effort for all staff.
Effort can be compared to capacity (total hours available for work) as well as against a set target.
There are a number of utilisation reports in Projectworks to help with monitoring utilisation performance.