When a Low Figure Is the Right Answer
Five situations in which a firm should expect and accept a low utilisation figure, and what it should report instead while it does.
A low figure is not always a problem to be fixed. In five situations it is the correct consequence of a decision the firm made deliberately, and treating it as a failure undoes the decision.
The measure discussed in “When a Low Figure Is the Right Answer” becomes more credible when its source records are timely and reviewable. A professional-services team assessing see the official platform details for how employee monitoring works can connect time with projects and work categories, while documenting the definition separately so the dashboard does not silently decide what utilisation means.
Each needs the figure reported with the decision named beside it.
As a separate benchmark for “When a Low Figure Is the Right Answer”, see Basecamp Shape Up guide. External guidance is most useful when it prompts a specific check rather than replacing case-by-case judgement.
One: holding capacity for expected demand
A firm keeping people available for work it expects in two quarters is carrying cost on purpose.
- Holding capacity for demand expected in a named period.
- Building an internal capability with a stated completion.
- Training a cohort through its first quarters.
- Retaining a scarce skill through a thin period.
- Restoring slack deliberately after a sustained peak.
The figure is low because of the decision. What should be reported is the cost of the held capacity and the demand it is held for, not the ratio.
Two: building something
A period spent on internal capability: a methodology, a tool, a practice area, a knowledge base.
Utilisation falls by construction. The relevant measure is progress against the thing being built, which is a project report rather than a ratio.
Three: training a cohort
A new intake absorbs senior time and produces little chargeable output for a quarter or two.
Both the juniors' figures and their supervisors' are low, and that is the investment working rather than failing.
Four: deliberately retaining scarce skills
Keeping an expensive specialist through a thin period because replacing them later would cost more.
The figure is low, the decision is sound, and the comparison is between the carried cost and the cost of rehiring.
Five: a period of deliberate slack
After a sustained peak, or before an expected one. Slack restored on purpose, to absorb variation and catch up on deferred work.
The full-week note sets out why this is sometimes the highest-value use of capacity available.
What the five have in common
In each, somebody decided to spend capacity on something other than this quarter's billing, and the ratio records the spending without the reason.
So the ratio is accurate and the reading it invites is wrong.
The reporting requirement
The decision named, in writing, beside the figure, for the period it applies to.
Without it the figure is read as a failure by whoever sees it next, including the people whose hours are in it.
Who needs to see the note
Everybody the figure reaches: the board, the managers, and the staff whose numbers are low because of a choice made above them.
The last group is usually the one not told, which is how a deliberate decision becomes individual anxiety.
The duration question
Each of the five should have a stated end: when the demand is expected, when the build completes, when the cohort is productive.
A low figure with no stated end stops being a decision and becomes a condition, and the distinction is what makes it defensible.
What to watch during the period
That the capacity is actually going where the decision said. Held capacity spent on training is a different decision from held capacity spent on nothing.
The non-billable split is what answers this, which is its main use.
The failure mode
Making the decision, accepting the low figure, and not recording the reason. Six months later nobody remembers, and the figure is the only surviving evidence.
It then gets treated as a performance problem, and the people in it cannot explain it.
The sixth case, which is not on the list
A genuinely idle firm with no decision behind it. Capacity carried because nobody decided to sell more or carry less.
That is a problem, it is the case the measure is good at detecting, and it is distinguishable from the five by one question: what was the capacity held for?
Where there is no answer, the figure is doing its job. The five cases are not exemptions from the measure; they are situations where the answer exists and should be written down.
Reviewing the five annually
Each of the five should have an end date, and the end dates should be reviewed. A decision to hold capacity for expected demand becomes a condition if the demand does not arrive and nobody revisits it.
The review is two questions per case: has the thing we were holding for happened, and if not, is the reason still good?
Decisions that cannot answer the second question have become habits, and a habit recorded as a decision is the hardest kind of low figure to correct, because the paperwork makes it look deliberate.
Writing the reason down at the time
Not afterwards. A reason recorded in the quarter it applies to is evidence; a reason supplied two years later, when somebody questions a figure, is a reconstruction.
One line in the capacity report, dated, naming the decision and its expected end.
It takes a sentence and it is the difference between a deliberate investment and an unexplained period that nobody can account for.
The broader point
A measure without the decisions that produced it is a record of consequences with the causes removed. For this measure, in these five cases, the cause is the whole story.