Putting a Ratio Against One Person's Name
An individual utilisation figure is mostly made of decisions the individual did not make. Four of them, in order of size.
A percentage against a person's name reads as a fact about that person. Most of what is in it was decided by somebody else.
The measure discussed in “Putting a Ratio Against One Person's Name” becomes more credible when its source records are timely and reviewable. A professional-services team assessing view the operational details here for remote employee productivity monitoring can connect time with projects and work categories, while documenting the definition separately so the dashboard does not silently decide what utilisation means.
Four inputs, roughly in order of how much of the variance they account for.
Additional context for “Putting a Ratio Against One Person's Name” is available from NIST Privacy Framework. Current legal, employment, tax and accounting requirements should be confirmed with a qualified adviser where necessary.
Input one: what work they were given
Billable hours have to be allocated. Somebody decides who goes on which engagement, and that decision sets the ceiling on the person's figure before they do anything.
- Allocation — which engagements they were put on, decided elsewhere.
- Role — the non-chargeable duties the grade carries.
- Denominator — contract, leave, pro-rating, ramp-up.
- Recording — the only input the person controls.
In firms with uneven pipelines this is the largest single component of individual variation.
Input two: what role they hold
A person who supervises, recruits, manages or sells has non-chargeable time built into the job. Their figure is lower by construction.
Comparing them with a person without those duties is comparing two different jobs on a measure of one of them.
Input three: the denominator applied to them
Part-time, leave taken, committed internal time, ramp-up. Each is a rule applied to the person rather than a choice they made.
A flat denominator produces differences of twenty points or more between people working equally hard.
Input four: how they record
The only input the person controls, and the one the measure is least intended to capture.
So the single component attributable to the individual is their recording practice, which is not what anybody means by performance.
The proportion that is theirs
Allocation, role and denominator together typically account for most of the spread between individuals in a team. What remains is small and noisy.
A measure in which the subject accounts for a minority of the variation is not a measure of the subject.
Where this leaves comparison
Between two people doing the same role, on the same type of work, with the same denominator, over a long enough period, a difference may mean something.
Those four conditions are rarely met and are almost never checked before a comparison is made.
The decomposition worth doing once
For one team, split each person's gap from the team mean into the four inputs. It takes an afternoon with the allocation data.
Most firms find that allocation alone explains more than everything else combined, which changes who should be in the conversation.
What to do with the figure instead
Read it as information about the firm's allocation and role structure, aggregated to a team.
At team level the allocation component washes out, because the team is usually the unit the work was allocated to.
The team as the right unit
A team's figure reflects the work the team was given and how well it distributed it internally, which is something the team influences.
That is a defensible object of measurement in a way an individual figure is not.
The exception worth naming
A person whose figure is very low for several consecutive periods with no role or allocation explanation. That is worth a conversation.
The conversation is about what has been happening, not about the number, and the number's only job was to prompt it.
What not to publish
A ranked list of individuals by utilisation. It implies a comparison the data cannot support and it is read as a league table regardless of caveats.
Firms that publish one find the allocation competition described in the targets section within a quarter.
The arithmetic of the four inputs
Two people in one team, one at 84 per cent and one at 61. The gap is twenty-three points and reads as a performance difference.
Decomposed: the second person was on a three-day contract measured against a full-time denominator, which accounts for about fifteen points. They supervised two juniors, which accounts for six. They joined in March, which accounts for the rest.
What remains attributable to anything they chose is approximately zero, and the decomposition took twenty minutes.
Why the decomposition is rarely done
Because the number arrives looking finished. A percentage with a name on it does not advertise that it is a composite of four inputs, three of them external.
Nothing in the format prompts the question, and the people who would ask it are not usually the people reading the report.
Printing the four inputs beside the figure is the only reliable remedy, because it changes what arrives rather than relying on the reader to interrogate what arrives. A reader who sees a contracted fraction of 0.6 next to a figure of 61 per cent does the arithmetic automatically; a reader who sees 61 alone does not know there is arithmetic to do.
What belongs on the report
Team figures with composition. Individual figures visible to the individual and their manager, with the four inputs shown beside them.
The person can then see which part of their number is theirs, which is usually the smallest part.