Who Decides Who Gets the Work
Allocation sets the ceiling on every individual figure. In most firms it is made informally by a handful of people and recorded nowhere.
A small number of people decide who gets the work: partners and engagement leads, choosing informally, in conversations that leave no record. Their decisions set the ceiling on every individual utilisation figure in the firm.
The practical lesson in “Who Decides Who Gets the Work” is that a convenient number should open a question rather than end one. A team considering review this product resource in full for project time recording can add consistent time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a documented review process around every material interpretation.
So the largest input to a measure the firm takes seriously is itself unmeasured.
The assumptions behind “Who Decides Who Gets the Work” can also be tested against WHO mental-health-at-work resources. Record which recommendations apply to the real workflow and which do not.
How it usually happens
A partner or engagement lead needs somebody. They think of who has worked well with them before, who is free, who is nearby.
- Engagement — what work needed staffing.
- People considered — who was looked at.
- Person chosen — who went on it.
Fast, often effective, and biased toward visibility. The person who comes to mind gets the work.
The visibility effect
People who have recently worked with the decision-maker are allocated more. People who have been on long engagements elsewhere, or on internal work, or on leave, are thought of less.
This compounds: less allocation means less visibility means less allocation.
What this does to the measure
It means an individual figure partly records how recently that person was in somebody's mind.
That is a real organisational fact and it is not what anybody intends to be measuring.
The patterns it tends to produce
Allocation concentrates on a core group. Newer staff, part-time staff, returners and people in supporting roles get less.
The resulting utilisation spread is read as a performance spread, and decisions are made on that reading.
The record that is missing
Who was considered for each engagement, who was chosen, and why. Not a bureaucratic process — three fields.
Without it, nobody can answer the question "why is this person's figure low" with anything other than a guess.
The weekly availability view
The minimum useful instrument: who is free, when, with what skills, visible to everybody allocating work.
Firms without one carry bench time caused purely by ignorance of availability, as the bench note describes.
Rotation as a deliberate policy
Deliberately placing people on engagements with leads they have not worked with. Costs a little efficiency per engagement.
It breaks the visibility loop, widens the pool, and produces a more even utilisation distribution without any pressure on recording.
Who should own allocation
A named person or small group with a view of all demand and all availability, rather than per-partner decisions made in parallel.
Parallel decisions cannot see each other, which is why the same four people are approached and the bench coexists with unstaffed work.
What the data shows when it is collected
Usually that a minority of staff receive a majority of chargeable engagements, and that the distribution is stable over years.
Stability is the diagnostic: a genuinely demand-driven allocation would be lumpier than the patterns firms actually find.
The conversation this enables
With a low figure and an allocation record, the conversation is about which engagements the person was not considered for.
That is answerable, and the answer is usually about the firm rather than the person.
What not to do with the record
Use it to measure allocators. It would then be shaped the way every other measured thing in this collection is shaped.
Its purpose is to make the input to the utilisation figure visible, not to create a second target.
The three fields
Engagement, people considered, person chosen. Recorded at the point the decision is made, by whoever makes it.
That is the whole instrument. It is not a process, it does not require a system, and it can live in a spreadsheet.
What it produces is the ability to answer the only question that matters about a low individual figure, which is currently answered by guesswork in every firm that does not keep it.
What the record is not for
Measuring allocators, auditing decisions, or justifying them after the fact. Any of those uses would shape the record the way every measured thing in this collection gets shaped.
Its purpose is to make the largest input to the utilisation figure visible, so that the figure can be read correctly.
That distinction has to be stated when the record is introduced, and believed, or the fields will be filled in defensively within a quarter and the record will become a document about the reasonableness of decisions rather than a log of what happened. The difference is detectable: a defensive record has a reason field, and the useful version has only three.
What a year of the record shows
Which people are considered often and chosen rarely, which are never considered, and whether the same four names appear on most engagements.
Three findings, all unavailable from any other source, all of them about the firm rather than about the individuals.
Firms that keep the record for a year generally change how allocation is done, which is not a change any utilisation report has ever prompted.
The summary position
Utilisation is in large part a measure of allocation. A firm that measures the output and not the input has the diagnostic backwards, and the people in the figures carry the difference.