The Information That Stops Arriving
A target does not only change behaviour. It removes the firm's ability to see certain categories of work, permanently, while the target is in force.
The familiar cost of a target is distorted behaviour. The less discussed cost is informational: several categories of work become invisible, and the firm loses the ability to know their size.
The practical lesson in “The Information That Stops Arriving” is that a convenient number should open a question rather than end one. A team considering how should teams evaluate daily schedule template? for daily schedule template can add consistent time and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a documented review process around every material interpretation.
This matters because those categories are where a firm's problems are usually diagnosed.
As a separate benchmark for “The Information That Stops Arriving”, see ACCA technical resources. External guidance is most useful when it prompts a specific check rather than replacing case-by-case judgement.
What becomes invisible
Hours on unsold pitches. Time lost to waiting for client responses. Internal rework. Administrative load. Supervision. Training.
- Pitch hours — the cost of winning work, an input to pricing.
- Blocked time — evidence about client-side process problems.
- Internal rework — the firm's only timesheet signal about quality.
- Supervision — the mechanism that catches problems before a client does.
All non-billable, all pressed on by a target, all sources of diagnostic information.
The sequence
The target arrives. These hours become costly to record. They are recorded less, or recorded as something else.
Within two quarters the categories read near zero, and a manager looking at the report concludes they are not a problem.
Why near-zero is read as solved
Because the report looks like a measurement. A category at one per cent reads as a category under control.
Nothing on the page distinguishes "small" from "not written down", and the second possibility does not naturally occur to a reader.
The specific loss: pitch cost
A firm that cannot see pitch hours cannot calculate the cost of winning work, which is an input to pricing.
So the target removes an input to pricing, and the pricing error shows up as write-offs two quarters later in an unrelated report.
The specific loss: waiting
Hours lost to blocked work are the cleanest evidence a firm has about client-side process problems.
Invisible, they become unmanaged, and the usual symptom is a pattern of overrun that gets attributed to the delivery team.
The specific loss: supervision
Senior time spent reviewing junior work is the firm's quality mechanism. Where it is non-chargeable and a target is in force it disappears first.
The quality consequence arrives later, as write-offs or client complaints, and is attributed to the juniors.
The pattern in all three
A measurement failure in one place becomes an attribution error in another. The cost appears somewhere that cannot trace it back.
That delay is why the informational cost of a target is almost never counted against it.
Testing for it
Pull the non-billable categories for the two quarters before the target and the two after. Look for categories that fell by more than half.
A category that halves in a quarter was reclassified. Work does not disappear that fast.
What to do about the categories that matter
Carve them out. State that pitch hours, supervision and blocked time do not count against utilisation and are reported separately.
A carve-out only works if the separate report is actually looked at; otherwise it is a quieter version of the same disappearance.
The protected-category report
Six lines, monthly: the categories the firm has decided it needs to see, in hours, by team.
Its only purpose is to keep those numbers alive. It should not have a target of its own, for the reasons this whole section describes.
The alternative that avoids the problem
No threshold, composition published, movements discussed. The categories stay visible because nothing is pressing on them.
It is the recommendation at the end of this collection, and this note is one of the stronger arguments for it.
The asymmetry that makes this permanent
A category that stops being recorded cannot be restored retrospectively. The hours happened and there is no record of them.
So the informational cost is not recoverable when the target is removed. Recording resumes from that point, and the firm has a gap in its history for exactly the period it most needs to understand.
That asymmetry is why the check should be run before a target is introduced rather than afterwards: a baseline collected once is worth more than any amount of later reconstruction.
The baseline worth collecting now
Twelve months of non-billable hours by category, before anything changes. One query, saved.
It costs nothing, it is the only version of these numbers that will exist under no pressure, and every subsequent question about what the measure did will be answered against it.
Firms that have this baseline can quantify the effect of their own target. Firms without it can only observe that certain categories are small and have no way to tell whether they were always small, which is the position most firms are in and the reason this entire class of damage goes unmeasured.
Which categories are worth protecting
Not all seven. The ones whose absence the firm cannot detect by other means: pitch hours, supervision, blocked time, and internal improvement.
Administration and bench time are visible in other ways. Training shows up in capability eventually, slowly.
Four carve-outs, named explicitly, is a short enough list to defend and long enough to keep the diagnostic parts of the record alive.
What a firm gives up by keeping the target
Not just accuracy in one number. The ability to answer several questions it will need to answer later, about work it will no longer have a record of.